Venom: Let There Be Carnage

I don't even want to get too much into this movie because I'd feel like I was kicking a disabled person. It's actually fascinating to watch a $110M piece of work that seems like every other scene was being concocted while the previous one was being filmed. An Olympics of the laziest screenwriting ("the governor of California decided to bring back the death penalty in light of these crimes" what the fuck?!). Kelly Marcel's role in Hollywood is to be given potentially problematic topics and then muddle them up in a way that doesn't offend anyone while still trying to appear superficially non-conformist. I don't know if they have no one better at Sony to do that, or if they just can't completely colonize certain topics, but nothing here holds together at all. (11/01/2022)

This movie was created just for the sake of a post-credits scene and making money... In Hollywood, you have competent and talented directors with vision, promising rising stars, ordinary artisans, and then blagging hustlers who are actually not very good at it and are hired just because they are not going to argue with the studio. Now Andy Serkis belongs to the latter group. Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a completely formulaic comic book movie that you cannot enjoy much due to the hackneyed screenplay, lackluster performances and chaotic editing. The whole thing is obviously heavily impacted by the PG-13 rating, and so many times during the movie you are left unsure as to how this or that character actually ended up, because everything is edited so "safely" that you just have no idea. Moreover, the comedy is incredibly childish. I cannot imagine that all the moviemakers involved got into it for any reason other than a paycheck. (19/10/2021)

If I were to write that the Venom 2 was as uninteresting and unimaginative as the first one, I'd be bullshitting, because I don't remember anything from the first. But it's certainly uninteresting and uninspired. Tom Hardy's cool, so is Woody Harrelson. Michelle Williams and Naomie Harris are solid actresses, but they're given little space. In fact, everything has a little space. Venom isn't even a hundred minutes long, and unfortunately a good third of the running time is taken up by weird sitcom outtakes about Eddie Brock and Venom's cohabitation, where the film tries to pretend it's a variation on The Odd Couple, only with an alien. Occasionally, the film remembers that it has a serial killer and his symbiotic friend in there, so it skips to a random action scene and try to pretend to be horror. For an hour, nothing interesting actually happens except for Venom and Brock's arguments mixed with Harrelson's overacting (you can’t play a deranged serial killer in such a small space in any other way), only to end with a final clash with a lot of pretty solid visual effects and an unexpectedly solid length. And then the end. I won't remember any of it in a week. Again. (13/10/2021)

Venom 2 is a perfect example of a one-off action flick. Story-wise, it doesn't have much to surprise – except perhaps, if I'm getting ahead of myself, the post-credit scene – and with a relatively short running time, there's not really much room for any plot-twists (except maybe one tiny one). The film relies mainly on action, light (black-and-red) humour and the interaction between the two "aliens", which doesn't always work. The character of Frances "Banshee" Barrison was largely underused, which is a shame. A brisk, perhaps a bit too digital in places for (really) just one viewing! (17/10/2021)

A bit better than last time, mainly thanks to great villains. Woody Harrelson and Naomie Harris are like Bonnie and Clyde, only crazier, their escape is one of the best comic book movie scenes in recent memory in my opinion, and while I often grumble about unnecessarily long movies, this time a few extra dozen minutes would have been easily tolerable, if it had been devoted mostly to them. Otherwise, Andy Serkis didn't bring anything new to the director's chair, but he did a good job. Marco Beltrami composed unfortunately similarly bland music as Ludwig Göransson before him, and Tom Hardy, the good actor, once again seemed to forget that he can act, and once again he goofs off (although, admittedly, a little less than four years ago). (22/01/2022)