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Venom: Let There Be Carnage review – Incredibly dumb, mildly fun

A better review for Venom: Let There Be Carnage would just to list off dumb stuff that happens throughout.

So let’s do that.

  • An alien who uses primitive bladed weapons most of the time hacks a government database by sticking its goo into a USB port.
  • Another alien becomes a biological camera and then a biological printer. Not a cool 3D printer, but the plain paper kind.
  • A governor somehow lifts a “moratorium on death sentences” because more bodies are found of an already convicted serial killer. Eugh?
  • Two idiots with conflicting superpowers team up and then get angry when their conflicting superpowers conflict.
  • An alien sensitive to sound goes to a rave.
  • Because only like 10 people exist in this universe all the main characters know each other through some mysterious pasts and plot conveniences.
  • Venom becomes an icon in the immigrant and LGBTQIA+ communities like that episode of Community, but much worse and not at all sincere.
  • Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock continues to be the world’s worst journalist and bumbles around like a fourth member of the Three Stooges.
  • The name of this movie.

Okay let’s do normal review stuff. Venom: Let There Be Carnage is the direct sequel to 2018’s Venom and features much of the same cast with Hardy as both Eddie Brock and the voice of Venom, Michelle Williams as Anne Weying and Woody Harrelson as Cletus Kasady and the voice of Carnage that was revealed in a post credits scene with one of the worst wigs we’ve ever seen.

As mentioned Hardy is playing a man who is all over the place and likely has suffered some kind of traumatic head injury at one point. The act got old fast in 2018 and we can’t believe it has returned in 2021.

Harrelson is even worse with Cletus Kasady supposed to be some over the top villain that mostly comes across as cringey and boring.

Both of these actors are talented and have impressed in the past but they, much like the rest of the cast, are sleepwalking through this.

The best way to describe the acting here is a university class that gives you a pass for attendance. The actors showed up but didn’t do any work.

This may all sound a bit cruel, but Let There Be Carnage (damn that’s still a terrible name) is just a chore to get through and the actors don’t help.

The plot is just nothing. Eddie Brock and Venom are hanging around, Cletus Kasady gets his own symbiote and becomes Carnage, the two fight. Roll credits.

Sure there’s some  extra stuff here like Brock and Venom separating for a while and another love “story” happening, but it’s all blown through so fast you just end up not caring.

That’s the overall theme of this movie really. No one will talk about this in a week or two after it’s released until Sony announces another sequel or it tricks Marvel into incorporating these characters into the MCU.

Say something good? Er well the CGI is pretty decent. It’s come a long way from the 2018 movie which was just dark globs of good flying around the screen. We’re still not sure who decided that the main bad guy in 2018, the symbiote Riot, should be grey. Not sure if anyone knows this but black and dark grey goo aliens fighting is a mess.

At least Carnage is red this time and has more differentiation in its design such as the aforementioned bladed weapons and extra tendrils.

Carnage is probably the best part of this movie (Carnage that is, not Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady) as the CGI here conveys a terrifying murder monster that is endlessly screeching for no reason but said screeching sounds menacing like a dinosaur that has stepped on a nail.

The titular Carnage is also kind of dumb just like everything else in this movie as it has a grudge against Venom for no real reason. In the comics the symbiotes have a long history with each other but none of that is explored here. Big bad red alien wants to kill big semi-good black alien. Drama. Explosions. Woo.

The music is entirely forgettable and not even the meme of an Eminem song showing up at the end was enough to make us crack a smile.

The writing of characters is predictably limp and we laughed once in the thankfully brief 97 minutes of film, a hilariously low hit rate for a movie that wants to also be a comedy.

There’s not much else to say. The review is over. If it seems a bit short or weak then it’s a perfect reflection of the movie.

Our score may be a bit high compared to other critics because at least everything was in frame and technically serviceable. We may also be too high compared to critics or audience who just want some “dumb fun”, but this is too boring to illicit anything more from us.

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