‘Venom: Let There Be Carnage’ Review: An Early 2000s-Superhero Oddity
Tom Hardy saves Venom: Let There Be Carnage from being a total disaster, but can’t help its story from feeling relatively weightless.
If you thought 2018’s “Venom” went back to the days that superhero movies were considered silly, as if it belonged to a bargain bin with Pitof’s “Catwoman” and Tim Story’s “Fantastic Four”, boy have you seen nothing yet. 2021’s “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” cranks the days of early 2000s superhero films to the max, with a B-movie-like style that perfectly fits its rushed story to get to the climactic battle of two CGI goos duking it out in a hodgepodge of barely discernible symbiotes. This time around, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) isn’t battling a Grey version of Venom, but a Red one in the form of Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson). Thankfully, the character has cut his Sideshow Bob hair from the first film and audiences will be able to take him slightly more seriously…until he starts talking in weird soliloquies and cryptic messages he says to Eddie, as he and his new best friend Venom uncover the dead bodies Kasady hid somewhere off the coast of California.
This discovery causes the governor to reinstate the death penalty for Kasady, but after biting off Eddie’s hand, our antagonist becomes possessed by a symbiote who takes hold of his body and transforms itself into…well…Carnage. As he said in the post-credit scene of the first instalment, Carnage is finally here and he is honestly quite disappointing. Since Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man 3” was released in 2007, there have been rumblings that Carnage would make his appearance in the fourth planned movie of the Raimi franchise, but plans were ultimately scrapped when Sony rebooted the franchise in 2012.
There hasn’t been a comic book antagonist that has been more demanded by the fans to make a big-screen appearance than Carnage. And now that he’s here, it’s a shame he can never differentiate himself from Eddie Brock, aside from the red color, slightly bigger build, and a couple of extra tentacles. He’s “Evil Venom 2.0” after Riz Ahmed’s Riot (who was “Evil Venom 1”) and the fight Carnage and Venom have at the end is as boring and sloppily executed as in the first film. It’s what comes before that’s slightly better than the first instalment, as director Andy Serkis truly knows how to draw a terrific relationship between a human and his symbiote.
Eddie Brock and Venom are Hollywood’s hottest power couple right now. There are a few instances in which it looks like they’re going to kiss, but that would’ve probably garnered the movie an R-rating. Instead, we painstakingly watch Eddie coping with a symbiote who has the insatiable urge of human flesh, but must either eat chickens or chocolate, since Eddie has drawn a strict rule of NO EATING HUMANS. He can make an exception, however, for Carnage, whose goal is…amazingly unclear…except to eat Venom so he can become more powerful? Running at a “lean & mean” 97-minute runtime, the film has very little time to juggle multiple storylines at once, while simultaneously drawing a complete and menacing antagonist.
There’s Eddie who has troubles dealing with Venom, as Anne Weying (Michelle Williams) will be marrying Dan Lewis (Reid Scott), Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham) trying to pin Eddie on the events that are happening in San Francisco right now, as he seems to be right in the center of them, and Cletus who wants to unleash Carnage, and yet none of these stories ever click together or go in any meaningful direction. It only seems like we’re watching distracting “turn off your brain” filler until the mid-credits scene comes to play and blows our socks off in a direction we never thought would happen in a million years.
Cletus becomes Carnage for the sake of being Carnage, so a fight scene can ensue, and some audience members could qualify it as ‘dumb, cheesy fun’, but an evil version of Venom has already been done. There needs to be more to Carnage (and the story) for us to attach ourselves to not only the hero, but the villain and care for anyone that gets in trouble with him, or Cletus’ sidekick and lover, Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris) also known as Shriek. Not a single one of the villains have any compelling motivation or something that would make killing Venom rewarding and unleash an ‘evil plan’, but we have no clue as to what Carnage’s evil plan is.
Carnage seems overtly vast and narrowing it down for a more specific plan would at least make Cletus’ goal to kill Eddie feel more urgent than having no plan and just winging it for an action sequence to ensue. Harrelson is a great actor and could’ve been a memorable villain with the right material, but he is pitifully underused here and barely exudes a menacing presence. Hell, the only thing that makes Cletus menacing is that he’s a stone-cold serial killer, but we never see him be that scary, or sickening, as the only menacing thing he does as a human is kick a corner store owner in the face. He’s just another evil symbiote Eddie will have to fight in the end, and that’s that.
The action scenes, while not as spectacular as other Marvel productions, are better than the first film, mainly due to Serkis teaming up with Robert Richardson to helm the film’s cinematography. Richardson knows how to make an action scene move through exciting camera angles and always fills the frame with vivid, albeit rapid and unfinished, images for us to soak our eyes over. It just becomes a little too convoluted when two symbiotes utilize the same fighting mechanics during its climax and barely look different (that’s a problem in and of itself in Marvel movies, but we’ll leave it at that for now).
What truly holds Venom: Let There Be Carnage together is truly Tom Hardy’s bonkers performance as Eddie Brock and Venom, who has a blast the entire time. Whether appearing at a rave as Venom to raise awareness for equal rights (that’s right, Venom is now a queer icon!) or to constantly fight off the symbiote as Eddie, since Venom wants to eat everybody around him is particularly hilarious to watch. If the film solely focused on the symbiotic relationship of Eddie and Venom, it could’ve been a good time, even if the film itself seems to be a little pointless. Doing so will prevent it to try and shoehorn a story to insert a long-anticipated villain that feels more underwhelming than whatever the hell Toby Kebbell did in 2015’s “Fantastic Four” reboot. Doctor Doom had more development than Carnage - and that was a new low in comic-book villains when Trank’s film came out.
It really says something when the best part of your film is a teaser for what’s to come in the next one during its mid-credit scene. Without revealing what exactly happens, it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out in the grander scheme of things and legitimately changes everything for Sony’s Marvel Universe. It feels like overhype to say that it’s a “game-changer”, since every critic who tweet out early reactions to Marvel movies and shows always say that any given title is a “game-changer”, but Venom 2’s post-credit scene is exactly that. When the post-credit scene came on, the audience quite literally erupted in cheers, which was the first time such a rock-concert ambiance was felt since 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame”, though they were pretty dead silent during the entire movie. If you enjoyed the first Venom, you will definitely love Let There Be Carnage, but if you hated the first one…well…you should probably skip right to the end credits scene instead. You won’t miss much.