Tag: Venom

Venom: Let There be Carnage Review

Venom: Let There be Carnage is the awkwardly-titled sequel to 2018’s Venom. While Venom wasn’t among the better superhero movies of recent years, it at least made the smart choice of saving its titular anti-hero’s primary nemesis, Carnage, for the sequel. So with the setup of its protagonist out of the way and a proper villain ready and waiting, the Venom sequel had the potential to be a big improvement over its predecessor.

Unfortunately, that didn’t turn out to be the case. Not only does Carnage fall short of the first Venom film, but it even bungles its namesake villain’s big screen debut.

Set a year after the first movie, journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) has hit hard times: his ex-fiancée, Anne Weying (Michelle Williams) is now engaged to someone else, his career is at a stand-still, and while the alien Symbiote Venom (voiced by Hardy) still resides in his body, the human/alien parasite duo have been laying low, due to Venom’s habit of “snacking on bad guy’s heads” leaving an accidental trail to their vigilantism.

The only break Brock can seem to get in his journalism are his interviews with death row inmate Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson), with Kasady refusing to speak to anyone else. Eddie is trying to get information on Kasady’s missing victims, something that Venom manages to deduce by looking at the sketches on the wall of Kasady’s cell. Finding the missing bodies propels Eddie Brock’s career, which in turn causes a riff between him and Venom (the latter of which is desperate to eat bad guys again, having to settle for eating chickens for too long). During one last interview with Kasady, the deranged killer bites Eddie’s hand, and inadvertently gets a taste of Venom in addition to Eddie’s blood.

With their relationship strained, Eddie and Venom “break up,” with the alien Symbiote removing itself from Eddie’s body and hopping from host to host as to see the city (though seeing as none of these hosts are “perfect matches” for Venom, a number of them die as a result of being his host, which makes me wonder why I’m supposed to see Venom as a good guy). Meanwhile, Kasady’s earlier encounter with Eddie has produced a Symbiote spawn within Kasady’s body, which calls itself Carnage.

Carnage is basically a stronger version of Venom, and allows Kasady to break free just as he’s about to be executed. With a superpowered alien now inhabiting his body, the already dangerous Kasady can now commit any evil deed he so desires. Though that ultimately amounts to little more than breaking his longtime girlfriend Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris) – who also goes by “Shriek” due to her supersonic screams – out of her own prison, and then setting up a makeshift wedding between the two.

Naturally, the only person (and Symbiote) capable of stopping Carnage is Venom. So Brock sets out to reunite with his gooey alien buddy in hopes to save the city.

And that’s it, really. There’s not much else to the plot other than that. I suppose I wasn’t expecting an extravagant storyline here, but I would have at least hoped that with a simple plot, the movie would flesh out the elements it does have. But it never does, with two key areas really falling short of their potential.

The first of those areas is the relationship between Eddie and Venom itself. Here the dynamic between Eddie and Venom is almost entirely comedic. The first movie played their relationship for laughs on a number of occasions, but Carnage plays up the “odd couple” aspect of Eddie and Venom’s relationship at the expense of everything else. And I have to ask, does every superhero have to be funny these days? Particularly someone like Venom, who was always an anti-hero anyway, isn’t he allowed to be a little more serious? Do we really have to see Venom perform a mic drop? What’s the point of a Venom movie if Venom is just going to act like any other superhero, exactly?

“There is a LOT of talk about chickens and chocolate in this movie.”

The other underwhelming aspect of the film is (somehow) Carnage himself. I don’t know, a serial killer possessed by an alien entity sounds pretty terrifying. It should write itself. Instead, Kasady and Carnage seem to have no clear goal here. And I don’t mean in a “mindlessly create mayhem and destruction just for the hell of it” kind of way. That would actually be a kind of goal for a character like this (Carnage is often seen as Marvel’s answer to the Joker). What I mean is that the movie has no real idea what it wants out of its villains. Kasady and Carnage basically make a deal to free Barrison so Kasady can marry her, and maybe they’ll kill Venom when they get around to it. Nothing more. They’re evil, they’re just not ambitious.

What’s worse, when you combine these elements with a short running time, Venom: Let There be Carnage just kind of zooms by. I suppose that’s a better alternative to a bad movie overstaying its welcome, but maybe with some more time, Carnage could have given us a reason to care about its story.

The whole picture feels like it’s missing something. More specifically, Let There be Carnage feels like it’s missing an entire second act. We have the setup with the “breakup” between Eddie and Venom, and the birth of Carnage, but then we basically go from there straight to the big finale. When Venom and Carnage came face-to-face, I expected that to simply be the first meeting between the two, which would lead to a bigger fight later on. A few minutes into the battle I realized there wasn’t going to be a round two before the movie was through. That was disappointing. If you’re going to drop the ball on the story in a movie like this, at least make up for it with an excess in action between the alien monsters.

I suppose on the plus side, Tom Hardy seems to be having a fun time (he also helped produce), and it’s a credit to him that he’s able to keep things afloat. Of course, this makes it all the more of a shame that the film is so hellbent on making Venom a funny character, because I think Hardy has more to offer to the role than what’s allowed.

There might be moments of fun here and there in Venom: Let There be Carnage, but the film fails to develop any of its pieces, and put them together into a meaningful whole. Venom himself has become something of a joke, Carnage is surprisingly underwhelming, and the film is absent of a proper middle act, with the two remaining acts feeling like they’re set on fast-forward.

The first Venom didn’t exactly set a high watermark to reach. Even still, Let There be Carnage is a disappointment.

4

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Venom Review

Venom is the kind of movie I wish I could say I liked more than I did. The idea of a Marvel film based around a villain/anti-hero certainly stands out in this day and age when several films based around Marvel heroes are released every year. But while the concept of Venom has some promise, and some strong performances, it ultimately feels indecisive with what kind of film in wants to be, which continuously halts any momentum it gains.

Venom of course tells the origin story of its titular anti-hero, a hotshot reporter named Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) who, after raising suspicions of illegal activity with Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) – the billionaire head of Life Foundation, a scientific research organization – loses his career and credibility, as well as his fiancée, Anne Weying (Michelle Williams). It turns out (of course) that Drake really is committing heinous crimes, having homeless people kidnapped and experimented on under the guise of medical tests. In truth, the Life Foundation has come into possession of blob-like alien lifeforms called Symbiotes, which can’t survive on Earth for long without latching onto (or, more accurately, into) a host. Drake is using his victims as guinea pigs for the Symbiotes, but if the host isn’t a perfect match, the connection between them and the Symbiode will quickly kill the host.

Luckily for Eddie Brock, at least one of Drake’s scientist actually has a conscience, and she seeks him out so he can expose Drake’s crimes (the cops are a no-go due to Drake’s threats, which I guess also include any official press, so Eddie – being fired and all – is her go-to I suppose). She sneaks Eddie into the facility, and during his escapades he accidentally releases a Symbiote, which then uses him as its host. Thankfully for both Eddie and the Symbiote, they are a perfect match for each other. Not that the film gives much detail as to what that means. Are they a biological match? The Symbiote also affects his mind, so does it feed off his emotions? The former is probably what the film intends, though the latter scenario seems like it makes for a more interesting character.

With the Symbiote in his body and mind, Eddie Brock is able to become the creature Venom, who can manipulate its liquid-like body in a variety of ways, in addition to possessing superhuman strength and agility. Although a decent stretch of the film is dedicated to Brock getting used to a life shared with an alien parasite, it eventually becomes your standard superhero fare, with Venom destined to stop Drake’s evil plots involving the other Symbiotes.

The film is at its best when it focuses on Eddie and his struggles with the Symbiote. Tom Hardy’s performances as both Eddie Brock and the voice of Venom are the film’s biggest highlights. Hardy gives both characters a sense of complexity that you wish were present in the rest of the film. Not that Venom is ever truly terrible (I’ve seen many worse superhero films), just that it can’t seem to decide what kind of movie it wants to be. It’s edgy and serious one minute, then tries to pull a Deadpool-esque joke between Brock and the Symbiote the next. It can, at times, be effective with being serious or comical, but it never finds a way to make them mesh together cohesively. So when we do get to the ‘funny bits’ after so much angst, it can come off as more awkward than funny.

Sadly, the characters outside of Eddie/Venom just come off as stock superhero movie stereotypes. Although Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed put in the effort, the characters they have to work with are just kind of flat and boring. This is particularly true of Carlton Drake, who falls squarely into the most cliched of super villain roles: the evil billionaire. I suppose it’s an easy archetype to work with (give a bad guy unfathomable wealth and it gives a good excuse why he can afford to act out evil schemes), but it doesn’t exactly change the fact that we’ve seen the evil billionaire super villain a thousand times before. On the plus side of things, the mandatory mid-credits sequence does give us insight as to who the villain in the next film will be, and given the character (and the actor they nabbed to portray him), that raises hopes for the sequel.

Without a more interesting villain here though, Venom suffers. Again, the film is at its best when it’s dealing with Eddie Brock’s struggles with the Symbiote. The film may have greatly benefitted if those struggles in themselves were the primary conflict of the movie, as opposed to the stock villain. Take a note from the Dark Knight films, with the first movie focused on its protagonist’s origin story, then deliver the big villain in the sequel. Venom got the second part right, at least.

As much as I appreciate the concept of a standalone superhero film these days (though I’m sure Sony will make sure Venom doesn’t stay that way), I can’t help but think Venom also suffers from existing in its own bubble without the Spider-Man aspects of the mythology. I understand that Sony has ‘lent’ Spidey to Marvel Studios, but I’m not saying this film needed to have ties to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There’s an animated Spider-Man film on the horizon with no connections to the MCU, so why not at least mention that the world of Venom has its own Spider-Man? After all, part of what makes the Venom character stand out is his contrast to Spider-Man. Spidey is the altruistic hero who’s willing to forgive even his greatest foes, while Venom is the more tormented soul who may have morality to him… but only to an extent, having no qualms with biting the head off someone more wicked than himself. With Spider-Man seemingly non-existent in this film universe, there’s no ‘greater good’ to compare Venom’s conflicting good and evil traits to, which ultimately makes him feel not all that different from any other super hero (sans for the head biting).

I don’t want to write off Venom completely. As stated, Tom Hardy’s performance does help elevate the film, and there are some fun moments and exciting action sequences. But by the time the credits start rolling, you won’t feel like you just watched a film that did anything for the superhero genre that you haven’t seen already. But at least when that aforementioned mid-credits sequence happens, you may feel that, next time, you just might.

 

5