Venom: Let There Be Carnage (REVIEW)
While watching the new Venom: Let There Be Carnage film I wondered to myself, is this disaster of a movie the “American carnage” that Trump was talking about in his 2017 inaugural speech? (Of course you could include 2018’s Venom as part of that calamity as well.)
Why we needed another of these symbiote movies is beyond me. That this would ever be presented to the public as “entertainment” is just another sign of the impending apocalypse. How could Oscar nominees Tom Hardy, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Williams and Naomie Harris ever find themselves attached to such drivel?
Tom Hardy is even credited with the “story” behind this film, such as it is. Annoying alien attaches itself to irritating reporter (Hardy) making them both extra-irksome. They get bitten by a serial-killer, Cletus Kasady (Harrelson) who absorbs the alien symbiote blood and becomes Carnage, an even bigger and more infuriating creature than the original. Aggravating noise and alien symbiote battles ensue.
The character of Carnage’s girlfriend, Frances Barrison (AKA Shriek), is also along for this ride (played by Naomie Harris.) I’m assuming she is there to cinematically manifest the repressed and maddening screams of the movie’s audience at having to sit through another moment of this film.
Directed by Andy Serkis (AKA Gollum from the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films) and written by Kelly Marcel, who also penned the screenplay for the first Venom film, I can’t think of a single positive thing to say about this movie except that it contains an interesting end-credit sequence, but it’s not worth risking Covid-19 infection and/or 90-minutes of your life to see it.
Venom has always been one of the most over-rated comic-book characters and I’ll never understand how he has garnered two movies now while the world patiently waits for big-screen film versions of Man-Wolf or Man-Thing or Namor, the Sub-Mariner or Ka-zar or, on the top of my personal wish list, Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth. (See Heroic Hollywood hopefuls: A comic-book film wish-list.)
If you think I’m being excessively harsh towards this movie, I assure you it is that bad and maybe worse. Marvel should be ashamed to have its name attached to this (even though it is actually a Sony film), it is embarrassingly bad.
