Venom: Let There Be Carnage

Marvel’s latest monster mash-up takes black comedy to new realms of darkness.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is the sort of movie that would make a great trailer. In fact, it did make a great trailer. There is more humour here than in the original, as well as a stronger story, but it’s a close thing. Venom is the extraterrestrial that cohabits the body of Eddie Brock, a journalist who has fallen on hard times. The idea of separate beings occupying the same physique is nothing new in the cinema, and was exploited to laughable effect in a recent horror film. Here, the Venom/Brock double-act might make for an amusing sketch on Saturday Night Live but it’s a tough trick to sustain for an entire movie. It’s just too absurd and the novelty of Venom destroying everything in Eddie’s life (that means anything to him) quickly becomes tiresome. As does the joke about Venom’s two pet chickens, Sonny and Cher, which are allowed to roam free in Eddie’s increasingly trashed apartment.

Tom Hardy, one of the finest English actors of his generation, not only co-produced Venom 2 but helped come up with the storyline. And yet his Eddie Brock is nothing more than a stooge, the straight man to the grotesque CGI jokemeister of the title. When Eddie’s local store keeper Mrs Chen (Peggy Lu) reveals, “I am thirty-nine”, Venom quips, “and I am Barry Manilow.” Which is a funny thing for an alien to say (an alien apparently fixated on 1960s’ pop music) – and particularly in that forbidding bass growl of his. Venom’s catchphrase “let me eat him” is also quite droll – up to a point.

The film’s opening, featuring appearances from Tom Hardy, Stephen Graham, Rosie Marcel (the scriptwriter’s sister) and Naomie Harris makes it feel like a British production. Indeed, the director is the Middlesex-born Andy Serkis (an entertainer with a mischievous sense of humour), while most of the filming was done at Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire. The final weeks were completed in San Francisco, where the story is set. Naomie Harris, who seems to be revisiting the role of the witch Tia Dalma she played in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, is enormously good value here, riffing off a demonic Woody Harrelson. The pair play a superhuman Bonnie and Clyde, whose love is stoked by their ability to slaughter the innocent and to cause holy havoc in San Francisco. Harrelson is arch criminal Cletus Kasady who – by the sleight-of-hand of alien biology – becomes Carnage, a blood-red Mr Hyde to Venom’s inky black Dr Jekyll. Thus we end up with a Godzilla vs. Kong spectacle, in which the raison d'être of the film seems to be total destruction and anarchy. There ain’t a subtle tentacle in Venom’s body and the mounting mayhem has all the finesse of a pneumatic drill massacre. It’s loud, crazy, showy and gratuitously violent, if you like that sort of thing.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

Cast: Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Naomie Harris, Reid Scott, Stephen Graham, Woody Harrelson, Peggy Lu, Sian Webber, Michelle Greenidge, Rob Bowen, Little Simz, Sonny Ashbourne Serkis, Reece Shearsmith, Rosie Marcel, Tom Holland.

Dir Andy Serkis, Pro Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, Amy Pascal, Kelly Marcel, Tom Hardy and Hutch Parker, Screenplay Kelly Marcel, from a story by Kelly Marcel and Tom Hardy, Ph Robert Richardson, Pro Des Oliver Scholl, Ed Maryann Brandon and Stan Salfas, Music Marco Beltrami, Costumes Joanna Eatwell, Sound Will Files.

Columbia Pictures/Marvel Entertainment/Tencent Pictures/Pascal Pictures-Sony Pictures.
97 mins. USA/UK/Canada. 2021. Rel: 15 October 2021. Cert. 15.