"Venom: Let There Be Carnage" not go-for-broke fun, just loud and slapped-together

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

“Venom”—the 2018 comic-book origin story about the pancreas-eating alien amoeba—might not have gained too many defenders on the critical front, but it was enough of a box-office success to warrant a continuation. Comparatively speaking, it was exactly the darkly wacky introduction the slithery-tongued anti-hero deserved. When everyone was biting off the head of director Ruben Fleischer’s entertainingly wonky movie, perhaps they were actually looking into the future and speaking about “Venom: Let There Be Carnage.” Whatever impish mismatched-buddy comedy pleasures the first movie offered are almost entirely absent in this loud, thin, slapped-together wrecking ball of a sequel.

Tom Hardy made the most of playing both bad-boy Daily Bugle journalist Eddie Brock and Venom with a delightfully schizophrenic performance. He does more of that again, as Eddie still has alien symbiote Venom “in” him. When Eddie visits serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson, now without the clown wig teased in the first movie's mid-credit scene) in his cell at San Quentin, he is offered an exclusive story to get his career back on track. Unfortunately for all of San Francisco, Cletus ends up getting a literal taste of Eddie’s alien blood, only to become a blobby alien monster he calls “Carnage.” First things first, Cletus must find his mutant girlfriend Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris), who can caterwaul with lethal results and has been taken in secret to Ravencroft Institute. Meanwhile, when Venom is tired of snacking on chickens, he leaves the "Eddie Brock closet" to do some soul-searching. To add more (alleged) tension, Eddie’s ex Anne (Michelle Williams) shares with him the news that she’s engaged with Dr. Dan Lewis (Reid Scott) and just wants his blessing. Somewhere in all of this, too, is hearing-impaired Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham), who has Eddie assist him on a case involving a string of murders that are somehow being orchestrated by Cletus from behind bars. 

In what is being packaged as an over-the-top blast of silliness that goes full-Venom, “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” certainly doubles down on the visual noise. But if going full-Venom is what fans craved the first time around, it’s quite wearying in execution. For the best, director Andy Serkis (2018’s “Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle”) and returning writer Kelly Marcel are not about to start taking any of this seriously. (One exception is in the 1996-set prologue, where Harrelson and Harris’ voices are bafflingly dubbed over those of their younger counterparts, and it’s probably not meant to be funny.) Tom Hardy still dares to go all in, switching back and forth between both Eddie and his vicious counterpart. Like before, the best moments in the film are just seeing (and hearing) Hardy act opposite himself. Eddie and Venom are just like an old married couple—you know, a parasitic one that bickers about whether or not they should eat human heads or not—but at some point, that charm of their dynamic turns into droning obnoxiousness, hearing one growling mumble speak over another growling mumble. One appreciable break is when Venom sneaks off to a Halloween rave, taking on other bodies, only to stand up on stage and deliver a speech about tolerance. Is a “Venom” movie really trying to insinuate itself into Queer Cinema?

Everyone wishes they were having as much deranged fun as Woody Harrelson as Cletus Kasady, whose pencil-sketched Twisted Backstory (including the murder of his grandmother) would make for a compelling Netflix miniseries. Cletus is pure chaos, and he would seem to make an interesting nemesis for Eddie/Venom, but he’s only ever treated to one note of being an unstoppable villain. Cletus does have a Mallory to his Mickey, though, and as Frances Barrison/Shriek, Naomie Harris is doing something—whatever it is—and letting out a glass-breaking shriek, but she has nothing more to play. Save for one adorably weird moment where Anne tries coaxing Venom to come out of a temporary host, the excellent-in-everything Michelle Williams might give one of her most perfunctory performances ever. Though Anne still cares about Eddie, her active role (with fiancé Dan along for the ride) comes so late in the game it feels more motivated by the plot mechanics. This time, every actor just feels tremendously wasted. 

As much as one would like to say it’s goopy, go-for-broke fun that embraces its silly self, “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” is barely any fun at all to turn off the “critic brain.” There is a manic energy to the Eddie-Venom banter before it grows tiresome, and then once all of the plot threads intertwine, it’s time for a CGI-loaded showdown in a church that’s just a dull mess of sinewy tentacles and tongues. In a better script that didn’t completely trim its third act to keep apace, the lack of focus wouldn’t feel so apparent, either, if there was anything to care about, but there isn’t. The inevitable mid-credit scene is more pleasing—and moving closer to being shared within the MCU and ensnared in Spider-Man’s web—than the film proper itself. “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” is a negligible throwaway that even our favorite organ-eating guy, Venom himself, might call a “turd in the wind.”

Grade: C -

Sony is releasing "Venom: Let There Be Carnage" (97 min.) in theaters on October 1, 2021.