Though it serves up a generous helping of intense, albeit uninspired action scenes, while pouring Woody Harrelson’s best efforts into his performance as the titular symbiote psychopath Carnage, the Venom sequel’s almost singular focus on creating a comedically dysfunctional dynamic between the two main characters only serves to accentuate the film’s failure to create a cohesive and compelling story. With the addition of poor pacing, frantic editing, and torturous dialogue, Let There Be Carnage is ultimately a pretty hard watch that continues to fail the source material its characters have been so crudely lifted from.

I can’t say I was as enamoured with 2018’s Venom as the majority of my more casual moviegoing acquaintances were – I found the film uninspired at the best of times, with its attempts to portray Venom as an edgy, violent antihero feeling excruciatingly tepid, and frankly the idea of a movie based on characters from the world of Spider-Man without the inclusion of the web-slinging hero himself seems an utterly ridiculous creative endeavour to this day. Nevertheless, Venom was well-received by general audiences, and after overperforming at the box office there was little doubt that a sequel was on the way, and that it would more than likely capitalise on the first film’s post-credits stinger featuring Woody Harrelson as serial killer Cletus Kasady – known more commonly to Marvel fans as the alter ego of the symbiotic Spider-Man villain Carnage. Flash forward to today, and Venom: Let There Be Carnage has hit the big screen – helmed by veteran actor and personal favourite of mine Andy Serkis, I was unsure how his talent might translate to directorial ability, but sadly I’m not all that impressed.

Spoilers ahead!

Let There Be Carnage actually has a pretty decent starting point; we check back in with Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) as he struggles to make a name for himself as a reporter while the police press him to spend more time with the incarcerated Kasady in the hope that he’ll reveal the location of his missing murder victims – it’s an engaging mystery and the dynamic provides something of substance for every character involved, and it would have served as a highly compelling foundation for the film’s plot had it not been squandered to the extent that it was. Rather than expand on the relationships between Eddie, Cletus and Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham), particularly Kasady’s mysterious obsession with Brock, the whole plot is miraculously resolved within the space of ten minutes after Venom is the only character to even notice that Cletus has drawn a map to the victim’s burial sites on the wall of his cell, and just like that the most interesting element of the entire script is snuffed out like a light. What Venom 2‘s writers instead chose to shine a light on in the story was a painfully unfunny subplot about Eddie and Venom’s relationship woes and temporary separation following repeated disagreements about their domestic life and stances on crimefighting that eats up a frightening amount of the movie’s runtime with scene after scene devoted to shockingly bad levity that in the end only serves as an excuse to mix Eddie’s blatantly dull love interest Anne (Michelle Williams) into a story she has no meaningful impact on.

Despite being the namesake of the movie, even the story elements relating to Carnage himself feel sidelined by the “break-up” subplot – the new symbiote is created when Cletus attacks Eddie and ingests some of his blood, which allows him to escape his execution, steal some things and kill some people for no reason, and then rescue his childhood love Shriek (Naomie Harris) from a secret institute, which he only discovers because for some reason one of Carnage’s abilities in this film is being able to insert his fingers into a laptop and immediately gain unfettered access to restricted files through the internet (yes, really). After freeing Shriek, the villainous duo decide to marry and wish to celebrate the occasion by killing Detective Mulligan, as well as Eddie and Venom, who are drawn out when Anne is inevitably kidnapped too. A big, predictable final battle ensues and our heroes of course come out the other side unscathed – while it might be refreshing in any other superhero flick to see the protagonist ruthlessly dispatch a dangerous villain, here it just feels on the nose after hearing the words “Lethal Protector” for the millionth time over the course of the movie, but the death of Cletus and Carnage marks the end of the story as Eddie and Venom for some obscure reason are forced to go on the run. While it might seem like set-up for a third movie, especially with the reveal that Mulligan has also been infected with a Symbiote, the film bizarrely ends with a post-credits stinger revealing that the duo have been transported into the Marvel Cinematic Universe continuity, which is evidently meant to correct the absence of Spider-Man in the Venom series thus far.

Still, don’t expect this to redeem the movie’s many faults by any degree – in failing to properly explore any of the interesting ideas introduced in the beginning of the story, Let There Be Carnage fails to do anything of note with Eddie, and by extension Venom, as characters at all. The pair argue, spend time apart, and reunite in time for the final showdown, but there’s no arc, or anything added to their dynamic by separating them, and it’s actually puzzling why the film devotes so much energy to that subplot only to offer absolutely nothing in return. The dynamic between Eddie and Cletus is similarly unfulfilling – there’s traces of something deeper sprinkled throughout some of the dialogue, but their relationship feels half-baked and there’s never any explanation as to why Cletus was so obsessed with Eddie in the first place, and running parallel to that there’s absolutely zero reason given as to why Carnage despises Venom so much, and in the end it leaves the rivalry between hero and villain feeling completely weightless. Harrelson gives it his absolute all as the psychopathic Kasady, but even a performance that strong can’t make up for the absolute void of characterisation – once again there’s a hint that there may be a more nuanced side to the character that ends up sadly unexplored, and when his love interest Shriek is essentially a non-character much like Anne or Detective Mulligan, it’s not at all a riveting turn of events when she eventually betrays him in the finale, and it really speaks to the quality of the script as a whole when there wasn’t a single character in the story that I cared for in the slightest.

With all that said, I can add on a positive note that Let There Be Carnage is at least a good-looking film – it’s packed with well-composed, picturesque shots, and while it does look quite dark at points (which probably doesn’t bode well for home viewing), the colour grading is excellent compared to the flat, washed out aesthetic that seems to be increasingly pervading comic-book blockbusters as of late; providing a gloomy visual language that borders on the tone of a horror movie. For a project that relies heavily on the use of fully animated characters, the CGI throughout the movie is almost consistently solid too, and while seeing the Symbiotes in battle isn’t exactly going to have you leaping out of your seat, Carnage in particular is a visually strong screen presence and in general the action is engaging and visceral when it needs to be; which given the state of the script, having the chance to turn your brain off for a few minutes may come as a welcome reprieve. I will say that the artists who worked on this film have done themselves a great credit to have accomplished this while working under the pandemic-related status-quo, and while there were a few things I could pick at such as moments of sporadic editing or a lacklustre soundtrack, the gaps in quality across the various facets of the movie do cause me to wonder how much of Venom 2‘s shortfalls may unfortunately be tied to Serkis’ skill as a director. Ultimately it feels almost saddening in a way that the hard work poured into the better aspects of the movie, whether from a star like Harrelson or the clearly talented team behind the visuals, in a way goes to waste when so much of Let There Be Carnage is utter drivel.

Given how the first Venom movie managed to succeed financially despite (in my view) being similarly trite to its sequel, as well as the continually uncharted waters of the pandemic-era box office having a part to play, it’s up in the air how Let There Be Carnage might perform at both a commercial and critical level, but I’ll more than likely keep an eye on how it fares in an attempt to gauge whether the Sony-produced Marvel movies have any future – and that still might hinge on how exactly Tom Hardy’s Brock and Venom figure into the mix in the upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is already boasting a cohort of characters from out-of-continuity Spider-Man movies. Regardless of whether or not the Venom series has a future in or out of the MCU, at present I feel far more concerned that the second entry has more or less ran what little interest I had in the spin-off franchise into the ground thanks to a terribly constructed script that continuously leans into its weakest elements while nothing but some decent visuals fight their hardest to prop up an otherwise dire example of a comic-book movie.

3/10