Review: VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE – These Great Marvel Characters Deserve Better
I was really hoping that Venom: Let There Be Carnage would actually be a good film that was better than the first one. Unfortunately, it ended up being another mediocre, forgettable film.
There was nothing new, unique, or different with this movie or the story it told. It was just a predictable cookie cutter comic book movie story with silly, over the top acting. Marvel’s Venom and Carnage deserve so much better than this! These are great characters with interesting stories and backgrounds, but this movie was so uninteresting! This movie only served one purpose, and I’ll get to that later.
The story was disjointed and didn’t have a smooth flow to it. It just felt sloppy and rushed to me, which is crazy because the story being told was so simple and cliche. Sure, there were some fun moments that made me chuckle, most of them involving the relationship between Eddie Brock and Venom. I actually liked that aspect of the film, but it wasn’t enough to save the movie.
I was really looking forward to finally seeing Carnage brought to life on the big screen, but unfortunately there was no real character development and he was a boring villain! How do you make Carnage boring!?
Venom VFX supervisor Sheena Duggal previously talked about some of the character’s powers and some new weaponized ones that they gave him in the film, which sounded cool! She shared:
“His arms and legs have the same priority as his other tentacles. He’s like the Vitruvian Man. Ultimately it's like fighting a creature who is made of barbed wire and like a bramble bush – he's so vicious and weaponized and powerful and dangerous. Even if he just swipes you with a tentacle, he's all covered in razors and barbs, you're just going to stick to him and be torn to shreds.”
While that sounds awesome, none of that was ever established in the movie! How is the audience supposed to know any of that!? What a waste. Carnage needs a multi-film story arc to properly explore the character. Shoving it all into one movie just didn’t work.
Hell, in my opinion Spider-Man 3 was a better film and had better story structure! Regardless, there are a lot of other people who enjoyed the movie. This is just how I felt about the movie. If you did enjoy it, that’s great! I wish I would have enjoyed it!
This type of comic book movie might have worked in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but with how far comic book/superhero movies have come since then in terms of storytelling, this movie just doesn’t compare. A high bar has been set, and Venom: Let There Be Carnage doesn’t even get close to that bar.
As the franchise continues, and it will continue, I hope that the creative team behind the franchise will figure out how to move the story of Venom forward in better way with better stories.
As for the only purpose that this movie served, that was the post credits scene.
In that scene, the Venom universe enters the MCU. Venom and Eddie are relaxing in a hotel in Mexico. As they’re talking, there’s a flash of light the hotel room changes and J. Jonah Jamison is on TV talking about the Spider-Man menace and Tom Holland’s Peter Parker is shown. Venom seems to become infatuated with him as he licks the TV screen.
While a lot of fans are excited about this, I’m a little worried because I just don’t care for these Tom Hardy Venom movies. Regardless, we all knew the crossover was going to happen, and there’s no doubt that Venom is going to appear in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
What did you all think about the Venom sequel and the post credits scene?