Venom: Let There Be Carnage

When you strip Venom: Let There Be Carnage down to its bare essentials, its basically your standard romantic comedy.  The couple in question is not so much former disgraced reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his ex-fiance, Anne (Michelle Williams), who is now set to marry someone else.  Rather, it is between Eddie and the brain-eating alien Symbiote he has living inside of him and sharing his body.  The two bicker over who is in control, they break up, and they make up just in time to save the world from a much more destructive Symbiote that has chosen a serial killer named Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson, in Natural Born Killers mode here) as its human host.

2018's Venom movie was a terrible mess of a film that still managed to be somewhat entertaining due to how off the wall it occasionally was, and how Hardy and the rest of the cast just threw all caution to the wind, and had a blast.  It wasn't a good movie in the slightest, but it had a kind of manic energy that I admired.  This sequel fully embraces that mania, expands upon it, and kind of feels like the movie knows what it is now.  It's still a mess, but the entertainment is stronger because the movie fully embraces the absurdity of its premise.  We're essentially watching Eddie and Venom the alien in their post-Honeymoon period.  Eddie is slowly getting his life back together, and Venom thinks it's all due to him.  He also feels that his human host doesn't treat him well enough.  Instead of feasting on human brains like Venom wants, all Eddie lets him do is eat the heads of chickens, and devour chocolates from time to time.

Like before, Hardy is a big part as to why the movie does work, and the sequel is smart to expand upon that.  He's essentially sharing the screen with some CG black goo that occasionally pops out of his body, or a rumbling voice that he can hear in his head that kind of sounds like Cookie Monster with a hangover. (The alien voice is also Hardy.) The actor is also credited with the Story, as well as a lead Producer credit, so he's obviously all in with this madness, and it shows.  As the film opens, Eddie's journalism career has seen a big boost due to him solving a decades-old murder investigation that's tied to the previously mentioned Cletus.  It was actually Venom who uncovered the clue that cracked the cold case, but when Eddie gets all the credit, it creates a rift between the two, and the alien eventually decides to try to find a different host, which leads to Venom going clubbing.  You just never know what you're going to see at the movies!

Meanwhile, the psychotic Cletus breaks out of his own lethal injection sentence when it is revealed that he has been infected with a different and much more vicious Symbiote called Carnage.  Cletus begins a city-wide murder spree as he tries to track down the only woman who ever meant anything to him, a mutant by the name of Shriek (Naomie Harris), who can produce super-sonic screams and is being kept in a high tech padded cell somewhere.  With Carnage's help, Cletus and Shriek begin a bloody search for vengeance against people they feel have wronged them over the years.  And while Harrelson and Harris definitely give these villains their all, they are a bit shortchanged by the script credited to Kelly Marcel (Cruella), which seems to kind of gloss over a lot of key details, such as Cletus' true connection with Eddie, and seems a bit rushed and hurried.

I appreciate that director Andy Serkis has given Venom: Let There Be Carnage a quick pace and a 90 minute running time that seems to fly by, but this does come at the sacrifice of the plot in a lot of ways.  Certain characters or story elements just don't seem as fleshed out as they should be.  Also like before, this feels like an R-rated movie that has been edited down to the "golden" PG-13.  Multiple murders are committed on camera and off, but they have been scrubbed clean, or hidden with some clever and rapid editing.  Like I said, Harrelson is giving an unhinged psychotic performance that calls to mind his role in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers.  But, this movie's somewhat sanitized tone kind of kills the effectiveness just a little.

Still, this is a stronger movie than the last one, mainly because it better understands what it wants to be and fully embraces it.  I doubt I'll remember much about this by the time 2022 rolls around in a few months, but I had fun while I was watching it, it gave me some decent laughs, and I really have to admire how Tom Hardy just throws himself completely into these movies, going so far in this one as to essentially have a slapstick fight with himself.  That's the kind of acting commitment that even Sir Laurence Olivier would be proud of. 

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