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“Venom: Let There Be Carnage” is many things: a blockbuster comic-book sequel, a mismatched-buddy comedy, an opportunity for some gloriously self-aware overacting. But at its core, beneath the wacky quips and gnashing teeth and gobs of goo, it’s something else entirely: a love story. Not between Tom Hardy ’s Eddie Brock and Michelle Williams as the one who got away, not even between Woody Harrelson ’s villainous Carnage and Naomie Harris ’ misunderstood mutant Shriek, but rather between Eddie and the hulking symbiote dwelling within him, Venom.

They may tell themselves they’ve achieved an uneasy détente since the original “Venom” from 2018. They may get testy with each other and argue over who’s really in charge. But eventually, surprisingly, they reveal a genuine, emotional connection as they come to the shared realization that they’re actually better together.

This is not a spoiler! Video messages before a recent screening from Hardy and director Andy Serkis admonished us all not to divulge any juicy revelations (which, come on Sony, we as journalists wouldn’t do anyway). However, you must stay through the credits, because some truly mind-blowing developments occur that you’ll definitely want to see.

It may sound insane to ponder notions like vulnerability and tenderness given that we’re talking about a movie in which a preening alien lives inside an intrepid reporter, bickering and bantering with him in the growl of a diabolical Cookie Monster (also Hardy, having a ball). Sure, Venom is constantly grousing about how he doesn’t get to bust out enough and eat people, and that a diet of chickens and chocolate provides insufficient sustenance. He’s often the voice of Eddie’s fears and insecurities (“Just leave me alone, you’re always nitpicking!” Eddie complains), but he’s also Eddie’s chief cheerleader, encouraging him to reconcile with Williams’ Anne, who’s now engaged to the far more suitable Dr. Dan Lewis ( Reid Scott ). He is the little voice inside all of us, writ large.

But silliness was the first film’s strength, which everyone involved seems to have realized and leaned into hard for the follow-up. The character of Carnage literally bellows: “Let ... there ... be ... Carnage!” at which point viewers around the world will have to take a drink. Under director Serkis, taking over for Ruben Fleischer , “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” is zippy and breezy. It’s not about the world ending, as is so often the case in comic-book extravaganzas, and it’s only sort of about one man’s struggle with his own literal and figurative demons. Besides giving a gung-ho physical performance, Hardy shares story-by credit with returning screenwriter Kelly Marcel —who, by the way, was wise enough to mine “ Fifty Shades of Grey ” for its inherent, absurd humor. While the bondage gear here may seem appropriate, “Venom” offers a very different kind of complicated, intimate relationship.

This time, Eddie has a chance to reign supreme once again over San Francisco journalism (such a quaint notion, that people actually read newspapers and follow specific reporters) by securing an interview with convicted killer Cletus Kasady (a scenery-chewing Harrelson), who’s about to be executed at San Quentin State Prison. But because Eddie’s reporting led to Cletus’ lethal injection, a physical clash occurs between the two men that includes some bloodshed—and the transfer of a few drops of symbiote material. As if we needed more reasons to stay six feet apart.

Cletus’ transformation into the red-hued Carnage—a larger, fiercer, and more weaponized version of Venom—is a frenzy of sound and fury. It’s also the first sign that the action in this sequel isn’t going to be nearly as compelling as the comedy. But at least you can actually see what’s happening more clearly than you could in the original film, thanks to the work of Robert Richardson , a three-time Oscar winner and Martin Scorsese ’s frequent cinematographer (“ Casino ,” “ The Aviator ,” “ Shine a Light ”). The first “Venom” also featured the work of a true artist in Matthew Libatique , but so many of those giant set pieces took place in the dark, at night, that it was often hard to tell who was doing what to whom. Here, it still gets a tad murky—particularly during a nighttime showdown outside a school for troubled children—but overall, the action is vivid. (Richardson is also an amusing choice, given Scorsese’s scandalous comments about whether Marvel movies are cinema. The director of photography apparently thinks they are.)

There’s never a moment or sequence in which Cletus marvels at his shocking, newfound abilities, which seems like a missing piece. Rather, he immediately wears Carnage around like a tailor-made suit, as if he were born that way. And his first order of business is to retrieve the woman he loves from a high-tech lock-up, Harris’ Frances Barrison, better known as Shriek for her ear-splitting vocal abilities. In a clever twist, such startlingly loud noises also weaken Venom and Carnage—although for some reason, the two symbiotes can howl at each other during battle like kaiju stomping across Tokyo and that doesn’t harm them. Maybe it’s a different pitch or frequency or something. Regardless, Cletus’ reunion with the woman he’s loved since childhood, as we see in a flashback, is never as interesting as the repercussions of Eddie’s ever-changing relationship with Venom. The film’s highlight is Venom’s solo trip to a Halloween rave, where he’s the hit of the party in what everyone assumes is an elaborate costume. There’s also a fantastic, smaller bit involving convenience store owner Mrs. Chen, played with expert timing and technique by Peggy Lu .

But what both of these scenes reveal is the softer, sweeter side of this symbiote, and the unexpected affect he’s had on people beyond just Eddie. They hit harder than the grandiose moments in which the giant black and red blobs hurl themselves at each other in mid-air. But don’t get too comfortable with the idea of a cuddly, cozy Venom. As the end credits remind us, there are always more movies in store.

Now playing in theaters.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some strong language, disturbing material and suggestive references.

Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock / Venom

Woody Harrelson as Cletus Kasady / Carnage

Michelle Williams as Anne Weying

Reid Scott as Dr. Dan Lewis

Naomie Harris as Frances Louise Barrison / Shriek

Stephen Graham as Detective Mulligan

Amber Sienna as Party Guest

Peggy Lu as Mrs. Chen

• Andy Serkis

Writer (story by)

• Kelly Marcel

Cinematographer

• Robert Richardson
• Maryann Brandon
• Stan Salfas
• Marco Beltrami

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Tom Hardy chews up Venom: Let There Be Carnage with chaotic glee

The Venom sequel makes a comedic superstar out of goo

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Venom doesn’t thrive in the superhero genre. Yes, the Marvel Comics symbiote is an alien goo that bestows its human host with superpowers, but its least interesting mode is as a lethal protector. Venom became popular because he was the dark version of Spider-Man, and shifting him from villain to vigilante dulled his attitude and appeal in the late ’90s. Over the years, the character has undergone transformation after transformation on the page, from alien-powered supersoldier to space knight to cosmic god , distancing him from his roots as the big black-and-white Spidey with sharp teeth and a spit-slinging tongue.

But nothing has taken Venom as far from his roots as the current movie version, which sidesteps Spider-Man entirely and uses the symbiote/host dynamic as a source of humor. 2018’s Venom saw a selfish, opportunistic jerk terrorized by an alien that takes over his mind and body. Now, in the sequel, the pair have to learn to live with each other without racking up a body count. Venom: Let There Be Carnage is at its best when it gets away from superheroics and leans into romantic comedy and body horror, highlighting the complications of living with a partner who hungers for human flesh.

Tom Hardy once again plays down-and-out reporter Eddie Brock and voices the alien that makes Eddie’s life hell. Hardy also co-wrote the story with screenwriter Kelly Marcel ( Fifty Shades of Grey ), allowing the movie to lean into the strengths of a grizzled heavy who happens to be a great physical comedian. Though it suffers from some of the first movie’s problems — mainly a shallow villain and underwhelming action — Hardy’s ownership of Let There Be Carnage has had a clear impact, with the movie recapturing the electric character dynamic from the original, and getting to the off-kilter odd couple stuff far earlier.

Joining Hardy on this more comedic effort is director Andy Serkis, the pioneer of performance-capture acting known for his work as Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings and Caesar in the recent Planet Of The Apes films. Serkis’ involvement allows the CGI Venom to take a true costar role alongside Hardy. Eddie’s conversations with his goopy buddy have an antagonistic charge, and the symbiote gains a more playful personality thanks to the clever implementation of Venom’s powers in Eddie’s personal and professional life. Early on, the movie plays like a wacky mix of Ratatouille and The Silence Of The Lambs , with Woody Harrelson filling the Hannibal Lecter role as serial killer Cletus Kasady.

Since the events of the first Venom , Eddie’s symbiote pal has made him a better investigative reporter. When Eddie interviews Kasady on death row, Venom scans the area for clues and memorizes the drawings on Kasady’s cell walls. Later, Venom recreates everything he saw in the prison by whipping Eddie’s body around his apartment, grabbing drawing supplies that Eddie burns through at superspeed. Serkis directs the scene with the frantic energy of a clown act. And the more madcap, the better. In one scene, Venom cooks breakfast for Eddie while singing “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off,” a gleefully absurd sequence that reinforces how these characters operate far outside the typical superhero mold.

Eddie and Venom have reached a point in their relationship where Venom isn’t humiliating his host with wildly antisocial behavior, which is actually a bit disappointing; ultimately, Let There Be Carnage never hits the cringe-comedy high of the first Venom ’s fish tank scene. Eddie has the occasional Venom-fueled public outburst, but more of the humor comes from Venom berating and belittling the reporter. The Little Shop Of Horror vibes remain strong, and the thing responsible for Eddie’s success is also his biggest headache because it’s so damn hungry for brains. And not puny popcorn chicken brains — Venom wants those big meaty human cerebra, and it doesn’t have much patience for Eddie’s qualms about murder.

At a lean 97 minutes, Venom: Let There Be Carnage doesn’t suffer from the kind of slack mid-section that weighs down so many action-forward superhero movies. In fact, the second act is when Venom gets to really shine as a character. He’s fed up with living in a host that doesn’t appreciate what he does for him and won’t let him eat the criminals they stop, so he decides to take his gifts elsewhere. Full of self-righteous anger, Venom digs his claws into the side of Eddie’s pretty little souped-up two-wheel drive and explores the city on his own, jumping from body to body and presumably killing each new host along the way.

This eventually leads Venom to a rave, where he positions himself as a champion of alien acceptance and free love. Featuring rapper Little Simz (who just released an exceptional new album, sometimes i am introvert ), this scene has been called Venom’s “coming out” moment . While that’s a mighty stretch, it does the heavy lifting of defining who Venom is without Eddie in a very unexpected, humorous circumstance.

As for Venom and Eddie’s relationship, it’s no substitute for the kind of genuine queer representation superhero movies largely lack, and Sony Pictures doesn’t get points for a queer-coded bond between a male human and a symbiotic blob voiced by the same actor. At the same time, their intimacy gives the story a fascinating romantic undercurrent, which is often played for laughs, but also has genuine emotional stakes.

Michelle Williams’ had one of the funniest moments of the first Venom with her legendary line reading of “I’m sorry about Venom,” but that small acknowledgment of Venom’s importance in her ex-boyfriend’s life drives Anne’s character arc in the sequel. She may have moved on to a new man (Reid Scott), but she still cares about Eddie, and is one of the few people that actually understands the otherworldly situation he’s trapped in. Anne is much more active when she’s not shackled to a thankless love interest role, which instead goes to Naomie Harris, who plays Kasady’s childhood paramour, Frances Barrison.

The Frances character is a total waste of an Academy Award-nominated actor, and the script has no interest in going beyond the most basic stereotypes around mental illness and romantic partners in crime. Meanwhile, the Kasady role feels tailor-made for Harrelson, an actor that can play over-the-top sinister with a sense of humor, though the execution disappoints. This isn’t a character that calls for subtlety, but unfortunately, Harrelson doesn’t have much to do besides sneer at the camera and deliver corny one-liners like “something wicked this way comes.” The movie attempts to humanize Kasady through his tragic romance with Frances, but it does so at the expense of Carnage’s menace.

The PG-13 rating doesn’t help, either. Let There Be Carnage is built around a bloodthirsty alien and a serial killer — an R rating could have made them both more threatening. The movie doesn’t show or describe Kasady’s previous killings in any sort of detail, and when he eventually gains his own symbiote, the most grisly violence is implied. Mature DC movies like Birds Of Prey and The Suicide Squad have really upped the ante in terms of fight choreography and gory special effects for superhero violence, and if you have a villain named Carnage, you want him to live up to his name.

Venom is a character rooted in sci-fi horror, but his scariest moment in this movie is a close-up shot of him escaping his latest dead host, which emphasizes the suffocating viscosity of the alien creature. That moment is tactile and terrifying in a way the more dramatic visual shots aren’t. The prominent placement of Red Vines in a gas station scene feels like a winking joke to the way the titular symbiotes look like licorice monsters when they fight, and while the symbiote battles aren’t as muddy as the first film, they still lack a lot of weight. The fluid symbiote imagery that looks so cool in static comic-book art is difficult to translate into live action, but maybe the movies have to think beyond human hosts. 2008’s “Old Man Logan” storyline, the inspiration behind the 2017 film, Logan, had the Venom symbiote bond with a Tyrannosaurus Rex . Bringing an ounce of the imagination Hardy devotes to the character work to the endless possibilities of the franchise’s action scenes would definitely get audiences cheering.

After two installments, it seems as though the Venom movies may always fall into the same symbiote action trap over and over again. But ideally these sequences will get shorter and shorter, allowing more time for the dysfunctionally affectionate relationship that gives this franchise its charm. Maybe the sequel can be a domestic dramedy in the vein of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? , with Eddie and Venom hosting another couple over for drinks to air out all of their baggage. Or go even crazier with the genre exploration. Spider-Man had a musical, why not Venom? Eddie and Venom could be the next Fred and Ginger if Hollywood just gave them the chance. Let these two eat heads and become the superstar they’re destined to be.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage opens in theaters on Oct. 1.

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When Venom, the slimy, villainous parasitic symbiote from outer space swung across movie screens in 2018, both he and his bonded host Eddie Brock (a stirring Tom Hardy) weren’t initially taken seriously. Not that they wanted to be.

The critical consensus to the foul-mouth, brain-eating monster origin story amounted to widespread pans. But for many, “Venom” struck a chord. It gave comic fans some of the silly banter they loved in “Deadpool” and subconsciously spoke to queer moviegoers who shipped “Symbrock,” the fan name for Venom and Brock’s queer-coded relationship, with affecting grace.

In the batty, deeply felt sequel “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” director Andy Serkis, who helped imbue warring primates with real empathy as the star of the “Planet of the Apes” trilogy, takes over telling the story of another misunderstood creature.

The key difference this time around is the addition of a second villain. The film opens in 1996 with a teenage Cletus Kasady (Jack Bandeira) sitting in a cell in St. Estes Orphanage, sending covert messages through a pipe to his love, Frances Barrison (Olumide Olorunfemi), occupying an adjacent cell. Frances, known in comics as Shriek, has a special, deadly power: Her voice is loud enough to crush the objects around her. The government ultimately hauls her away from Cletus, and she loses an eye after a young cop shoots her.

The distressing opening showcases how Hardy (who has a story credit in addition to starring) and screenwriter Kelly Marcel effectively craft well-built characters in this brisk, 97-minute sequel. Flash forward to the present day, and Cletus (Woody Harrelson) is now on death row. Demented and cheeky, he’s endured years of abuse, ultimately leading him to kill his relatives and murdering even more along the way.

He personally requests a meeting with Brock, believing the journalist can get his message — an incognito haiku addressed to Frances, now imprisoned in a secret government facility — printed on the front page in return for his life story. Cletus is both a terrifying character and yet still somewhat sympathetic: The system let him down.

Brock isn’t doing much better: His ex-girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams) knows that with Venom in the fold there can never be room for her, and decides to marry her boyfriend Dan (Reid Scott), crushing Brock. As Anne and Dan’s relationship grows richer, both Williams and Scott take big performative breaths with the added dramatic oxygen. Their ping-pong banter with a hilarious Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) demonstrates a winning rapport.

“Let There Be Carnage” thrives as a couples movie: Not only do Dan and Anne fortify their mutual love, Brock and Venom deal with their own lovers’ squabbles. No, the pair aren’t officially in a romantic relationship. But this movie is very aware of the queer subtext written into “Venom” — sometimes too aware in bits of on-the-nose dialogue.

Serkis gives “Symbrock” fans what they want by bringing that subtext plainly to the surface. See, Brock blames Venom for his breakup with Anne. It’s also getting more difficult to control the violent symbiote: He needs brains to feed on, and the substitutes — chocolate and live chickens — aren’t enough to satiate his hunger. Especially since he refuses to eat their flatmates, two hens Venom has affectionately named Sonny and Cher.

For a time, Serkis allows this sequel to work as a breakup film. Despite Venom trying his best — he makes breakfast for Brock; couple goals, really — the pair fight. Their domestic squabble is one of the better shot showdowns in “Let There Be Carnage.” The insults they hurl toward each other are tightly layered on a sonic level. The compositions, a parade of fists and thrown objects — Venom launches a big-screen television out the window — are stitched together with clarity through Maryann Brandon and Stan Salfas’ taut editing. This fight isn’t a big exploding comic book-style firework show. It’s a disagreement grounded in a real toxic relationship, and that groundedness consistently allows “Let There Be Carnage” to flourish.

After Brock betrays Cletus, the enraged killer bites Brock’s hand, gaining his own symbiote, a bloodthirsty, uncontrollable alien he names Carnage. The pair decide to do four things: Spring Cletus’ girlfriend Frances (played as an adult by a gloriously demented Naomie Harris), kidnap Anne, kidnap Det. Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham), and kill Venom/Brock.

While the narrative is enjoyable, the visuals in “Let There Be Carnage” are as inky as Venom. It’s nearly impossible to follow any of the fight sequences. Cletus’ escape from prison, for instance, is a swirling mess of CGI junk. If you squint hard enough, maybe you can spot Carnage’s red jagged symbiote arm slashing humans to death. But more likely, the serrated frames will feel like a disappointing appetizer in place of a filling main course. It’s a major flaw in an altogether enjoyable picture that’s so off-the-wall it features a heartbroken Venom delivering a pro-immigration speech at a costume party rave.

Whatever shortcomings the brawls have, it’s the human element, ironically in a film filled with parasitic space aliens, that captures the heart. Even in their brief scenes together, Harrelson and Harris possess tangible chemistry, a sultry bond fused by their enrapturing glances. Meanwhile, Cletus and Carnage aren’t so close. Unlike Brock, who offers guardrails to Venom, Cletus and Carnage enable their worst impulses, demonstrating the ways relationships can thrive and fail.

Brock and Venom ultimately do make up, teaming to fight the far more powerful Carnage in a large-scale battle through a San Francisco cathedral. The culminating tussle causes massive damage on screen, but it’s the heavy CGI that truly eviscerates whatever drama might be had.

Still, even when comic book fans inevitably go wild for a game-changing mid-credits scene, it’s not the promised spectacle that cements “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” as touching, wild entertainment. It’s the themes of home, love, and companionship that make Serkis’ sequel another reason to want more “Venom” movies, and quickly.

'Venom: Let There Be Carnage'

Rating: PG-13, for intense sequences of violence and action, some strong language, disturbing material and suggestive references Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes Playing: In general release

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage Review

Match made in heaven..

Venom: Let There Be Carnage hits theaters on Oct. 1.

Director Andy Serkis describes Venom: Let There Be Carnage as a love story (which it definitely is) between Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom (also Tom Hardy). That idea is skillfully reflected through the lean script and directing choices. Serkis gives us a sequel with entertaining action sequences, a more personal approach, a lot of humor, and a thrilling final showdown between Eddie/Venom and Cletus Kasady/Carnage (Woody Harrelson).

Picking up after a passage of time only marked by Kasady’s sleek new haircut, Let There Be Carnage has an unhinged villain whose motives are vengeful and driven by pain. As Eddie and his police detective partner put together the pieces of his killing spree, we see a dramatic pivot from the sci-fi conspiracy of the first movie to something that plays like a comic-book movie hybrid of serial killer thrillers like Seven or Zodiac (yes, really). Of course, those movies are brilliant, so it is a fine template to work off when handling a villain similar to so many of America’s real-life monsters, had they been granted some really terrifying superpowers.

Which movie in Sony's Spider-Man Universe are you most excited to see?

This really is a bizarre hybrid of monster and murder movie, but Serkis efficiently balances various tones, visual spectacles, and humorous performances to surprisingly make it work. Much like Eddie does, the sequel lets its weirder side out and the symbiote is given more time to shine. Venom’s one-liners cut through tense moments as comedic relief, resembling a combination of Clayface from the HBO Max Harley Quinn show and the MCU’s Drax. Or, as Eddie describes him, a “pig-dog horse-duck.”

The people around him, however, do care for this lethal giant and provide excellent connective tissue between characters. We’re given a much smaller, yet efficiently used supporting cast with Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham), Anne (Michelle Williams), Dan (Reid Scott), and even Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu). All these characters interact and intersect over the course of the movie, emphasizing a smaller world and scope to navigate in, as well as a more personal threat to Eddie’s social circle.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage Movie Images

Serkis’ experience as a motion-capture artist comes through as he directs more active and physical scenes. His trust in practical and computer-generated visual effects hammers home Venom’s physical presence and destruction in impressive and tangible ways, like when Venom tears up Eddie’s kitchen in a scene that seems straight from Fantasia’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The active camera movement matches the cold-blooded, chaotic energy brought on by Carnage and Kasady. Their motives cannot be reasoned away; their twisted feelings of justice empower them to savage acts of violence. We witness this fully in the only fight between Venom and Carnage. The battle is packed with feral, creative limb-slinging between the two symbiotes as Carnage jabs with grotesque spiked arms and Venom defends with an instinctive survival mentality, an explosion of CGI monsters and pyrotechnics that’s gripping to watch.

Let There Be Carnage’s strongest assets are our villains: Kasady, Carnage, and Shriek (Naomie Harris). They are antagonists with style and showmanship, something lacking in many of Marvel’s movies, reveling in the disaster they leave in their wake. As Kasady, Harrelson channels his Natural Born Killers character, Mickey Knox, fighting against the abusive systems of his past. When he’s reunited with someone who’s just as smart, brutal, and remorseless as he is and their chemistry takes hold, it’s actually hard not to root for them to burn everything to the ground. You can tell that they’re having fun pushing the PG-13 rating with the bodies they lay waste to. I mean, in the middle of admiring their havoc, I wrote in my notes, “They’re freaky. I love them!” It’s a shame that we don’t get more of Harris in Let There Be Carnage, not only for her magnetic performance, but also to get any context for her powers and much of her backstory. However, given what we know about symbiotes, this dynamic presents their relationship with a troubling caveat, emphasizing a star-crossed romance between the two.

Even still, the main relationship that’s tested through this rampage of mayhem is between Eddie and Venom. While Let There Be Carnage has fun implying a romance between the two, their relationship is still more like a beleaguered pet owner and untrained puppy, with exasperation painted on Hardy’s face. Now that neither have to worry about a whole alien race trying to take over the planet, Venom can act more like the impulsive goofball that he really is, which is the opposite of Eddie’s own urges.

Like many ill-fated relationships, Eddie and Venom have a lot of communication issues, which is what gets them into this mess with Carnage. Compared to how quickly Kasady and Carnage teamed up, it seems like Eddie and Venom will never see eye to eye (*Venom voice* since he will always be the bigger person). While they both eventually realize that they need each other and compromise to stop a bad guy, neither really learns what makes the other important – not truly. But they’re building a symbiotic relationship meant to be sustainable, so we’re rooting for those two crazy kids to make it work!

All that said, while Let There be Carnage has a structurally sound plot meant to redirect the franchise, it’s still one that’s playing catch-up to where superhero movies are now in 2021. It plays it pretty safe, and doesn't take the kind of exciting swings that thrilling contemporaries like The Suicide Squad or Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings have. It’s the conventionally perfect length for a film, clocking in a little over 90 minutes while it slavishly follows the typical hero’s journey. And that’s fine! This story started off too big and too complicated in the first movie, so it’s good that it scales back to focus on finding its voice.

There is no arguing that this movie doesn’t have stellar villains who followed through on their threats of bringing utter chaos and carnage to those who have wronged them. With its otherwise safe decisions, it was reassuring to see the ending and post-credits scene lay out a new direction for the Venom series, and it’s exciting to think about what happens to our duo next.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage finally pairs Venom and Eddie with a worthy villain in a story that embraces its weirder side. Andy Serkis directs a fun and action-packed sequel that highlights Venom as his own character and features Woody Harrelson and Naomie Harris as breakout villains with excellent chemistry. Taking itself less seriously and having more fun, its relatively short runtime is packed densely with plenty of action, character development, and campy humor. At the same time, it’s a love story about relationships evolving and learning to grow and trust each other. Venom as a series is working through its growing pains, but it looks like it’s uphill from here.

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage Reviews

When I saw the first movie’s end credits, I was not excited so maybe I should have known better than to buy a ticket, but the end credits for “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” are awesome.

Full Review | Jun 12, 2024

Director Andy Serkis gets enough support from Hardy and fills the screen with enough big explosions to make the end result fun.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 10, 2023

While still as messy as the first one, Carnage helps bring the nonsense to a fun and enjoyable time.

Full Review | Aug 9, 2023

A random, insane, & entertaining comic book movie you would find buried in the back of a Home Video Store that you watch & go OH THIS IS COOL!

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

It’s still a bizarre, messy and disjointed ride. But, despite its failings, it is a smile-inducing entry.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2023

While many sequels pale in comparison to their predecessors, you will be happy to know Venom: Let There Be Carnage bucks that trend, from the writing to the fight sequences, animation, and special effects.

Full Review | Jul 19, 2023

Venom should be threatening first and foremost, with only the occasional hint of whimsy as a means of subversion. Never in my whole life have I wanted to see Venom flip pancakes or wear glow sticks at a rave. He's almost a parody of himself in this movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 7, 2023

The film fails to use Carnage effectively and seems like it would be better off without him.

Full Review | Aug 30, 2022

Some may be able to coast through the 93 minutes ignoring the movie’s glaring flaws. I wish I could. Instead I kept seeing glimpses of the movie I wish this had been.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 17, 2022

The comedy in Venom 2 Let there be carnage was great, until it wasn't

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Aug 15, 2022

It's knowingly absurd, boasts a self-aware lead and moves quickly — when the climax hits, it feels like everything before it breezed by — but Let There Be Carnage remains a slog.

Full Review | Aug 13, 2022

This sequel stands as a marked improvement in every department

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 12, 2022

Tom Hardy...if you are reading this...let me know if you need help. You don't have to keep doing this to yourself.

Full Review | Original Score: F- - - | Jun 9, 2022

This sequel is clearly in on the joke this time, but I'm still not entirely sure it's all that funny.

Full Review | May 30, 2022

Though Serkis brings more personality to the Brock/Venom dynamic, "Venom: Let There Be Carnage" is just as uneven as the first film and perhaps more annoying this time around than bland.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | May 20, 2022

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is slight, but its a reminder that comic book films are also meant to be fun, entertaining and ridiculous

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 19, 2022

This Venom is content to be the messy, sweary older brother of the Spider-man franchise, reveling in the chaos and silliness. Neutrals will enjoy a comic book movie that doesnt take itself so seriously.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 3, 2022

The film allows us to witness the growing pains of them realizing their love, and that’s just beautiful.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 23, 2022

"If youre one of those who have made it a point to remain uninitiated from the moody malaise and saving-the-world stakes of other superpowered cinema, 'Let There Be Carnage' may very well be the CBM for you."

Full Review | Feb 22, 2022

For better or for worse, Venom: Let There Be Carnage is exactly what it claims to be. It is a somewhat bad cgi-fest of characters flipping each other off and fighting each other.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Feb 15, 2022

Venom: Let There Be Carnage Review

15 Oct 2021

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

There’s no getting around it: for all its vast flaws, Venom was a massive hit. Despite it being a Spider-Man spin-off with no actual Spider-Man — one which neutered its edgy, horror-inflected, fan-favourite comic-book character in a visually murky PG-13 origin story — audiences turned up in their droves to watch Tom Hardy play Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote alter-ego. Amid the drudgery came moments of amusing, head-scratching weirdness (Hardy jumping into a lobster tank at a restaurant!), and while Let There Be Carnage is more confident in exploring those out-there qualities (the surprising prominence of a pair of chickens named Sonny and Cher!), this sequel is still a dispiritingly weak outing for one of Marvel’s cultiest characters.

From the first film, it was clear that Tom Hardy has a genuine affinity for both Brock and Venom (whom he also voices in booming, gravelly tones) — a sort of sad-bro Jekyll and his lunk-headed, brain-munching Hyde. Here he’s credited as co-writer alongside Kelly Marcel , and while the looser, more consistent portrayal of the dual role this time around feels driven by Hardy’s personal passion, their goofy banter remains a curious take on the character that slathers the concept’s ’90s gnarliness with cheese.

That PG-13 rating is perhaps the biggest flaw here, leaving Serkis hamstrung. There’s precious little carnage to be had.

There’s a kernel of a good idea here — that Let There Be Carnage is a kind of double break-up movie, as Brock wrestles with his split from Michelle Williams ’ Anne (still grossly underused) while also doubting his relationship with Venom. (Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Scenes From A Symbiote Marriage’, anyone?) But while a Venom-Brock romcom sounds fun, the reality is a tonal mishmash of unfunny gags — Venom’s voice-over trash-talk is woefully lame, a watered-down stream of Deadpool-ish, audience-winking irreverence that plays like a symbiotic director’s commentary you can’t turn off — layered on a poorly plotted story with action sequences that don’t hold up to the myriad other comic-book movies out there.

It’s especially disappointing given the talent involved this time out. Ruben Fleischer is out as director, replaced by the great Andy Serkis — but any hopes that the performance-capture genius, behind richly drawn CG creations like Gollum and Planet Of The Apes ’ Caesar, might be able to conjure some clarity among the quick-cutting chaos of the dimly lit action sequences are soon dashed. The splodgy-symbiote effects are a marginal improvement over the previous film, but it’s impossible not to ponder what Serkis could have created with a bigger budget and bolder rating.

Once again, that PG-13 rating (an extraordinarily mild 15 here in the UK) is perhaps the biggest flaw here, leaving Serkis hamstrung with a titular promise that simply cannot be delivered upon — there’s precious little carnage to be had. Woody Harrelson ’s incoming villain, serial killer Cletus Kasady — mercifully shorn of the bizarre Mick Hucknall wig he donned in the last film’s cameo, now replaced by a creepy crew-cut — trades on Zodiac-coded creepiness but never feels threatening, and when his symbiote parasite (named ‘Carnage’ for no discernible reason) takes over, any trademark head-chomping is left to the imagination. Even an implied poultry massacre takes place off-screen.

Throughout, there are brief glimmers of a better film. In an early confrontation between Brock and Kasady — which the script bends over backwards to accommodate — the convicted murderer gestures to our uncomfortable fascination with true-crime (“People love serial killers!”); there’s a striking animated sequence depicting the horrors of Kasady’s past; Peggy Lu’s scene-stealing shopkeeper Mrs Chen shows how fun Venom’s body-swapping conceit could be. But it’s frequently frustrating, too — the mega-talented Naomie Harris picks up the squandered-talent baton from Riz Ahmed as Kasady’s equally evil lover Frances; the very nature of Carnage is ill-defined; Williams’ Anne largely spends the final act gagged and bound in a box.

Against the mildest of expectations, Venom: Let There Be Carnage doesn’t exactly under-deliver — and fans of the first film won’t grumble. But if this is the bar for cinematic comic-book carnage, it’s low. A literal world away from the consistent quality of Marvel Studios fare, pray that Venom never latches onto the MCU proper.

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Who Let Venom: Let There Be Carnage In on the Joke?

Everyone’s in on the joke in Venom: Let There Be Carnage , and it’s more of a bummer than I could have imagined. The 2018 Venom wasn’t exactly a paragon of subtlety, restraint, or good filmmaking, but there was a crackpot charm to it that had everything to do with how most of the cast acted as if they were in a gritty comic-book adaptation while Tom Hardy … did not. Muttering and soaked in sweat, Hardy lurched through the movie insistent that the saga of how a swaggering investigative journalist named Eddie Brock becomes host to a cannibalistic alien symbiote was, in fact, a buddy comedy. His performance felt like an assault on the implicit promise of any super(anti)hero origin story — that whatever sacrifices and losses its main character may accrue, they will be blessed in return with a modicum of cool. Eddie never became cool. Eddie ate a rotting chicken carcass out of the garbage and jumped into the lobster tank at a restaurant, and even after saving the day, he did not get the girl but did keep the alien, with whom he constantly bickers.

Eddie is still not cool in Venom: Let There Be Carnage , but his shambolic lack of dignity is less entertaining because everyone around him has started doing shtick too. Chief among them is Woody Harrelson as serial killer Cletus Kasady, who invites Eddie to prison to interview him and then bites his hand, getting a taste of extraterrestrial-infected blood that enables the murderer to sprout a symbiote all his own — the titular Carnage. Does Cletus-as-Carnage yell the film’s subtitle at one point, just for extra emphasis? You bet he does. He also gives the damnedest pronunciation of origin I’ve ever heard (it’s something like o-REE-gin ) and wears a terrible wig that’s different from the one he wore in the Venom stinger. Cletus wants only to reunite with the object of his obsession, Frances Barrison — a mutant he met in reform school who has spent most of her life in a secret facility. As an adult, she goes by “Shriek” and is played by Naomie Harris, who happens to be 15 years younger than the actor playing her childhood sweetheart. Harris glowers and gives good deranged villainess face but has shockingly little to do — she barely gets to use her powers! — whereas Harrelson has too much. His exhausting performance is barely mitigated by a nifty bit of animated backstory and his tentacled stretches as a red creature who slaughters countless people in bloodless, PG-13 fashion.

About that: The first time Venom spots Carnage, it yelps “That is a red one!” and tries to exit. This tossed-off implication that Carnage is a phenomenon of a sort Venom has encountered before is as far as the movie goes in terms of lore. And while there’s a relief to being unburdened of superheroic exposition, the sheer lack of curiosity any of the characters have about the new murder monster in their midst attests to how slapdash this sequel is. It’s so obviously shaped by fan response that it feels like the movie equivalent of someone who went viral online and now can only repeat themselves to diminishing returns in an attempt to hawk merch while they can. Hardy, who was responsible for most of what made the first film good, seems to be one of the primary reasons the sequel feels so desperate. The actor — who spends much of the film dressed in Eddie Murphy’s outfit from Beverly Hills Cop for reasons unclear beyond the first name his character and the comedian have in common — shares a story credit with writer Kelly Marcel. The result is a script that devotes an awful lot of time to Hardy-as-Eddie talking to himself-as-Venom.

The odd couple argues about Venom’s diet of chicken and chocolate, and about not going out and doing more brain-eating vigilante work, and about the chances of reuniting with Eddie’s ex-fiancée, Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), and about Eddie’s lack of skill as a reporter. At one point, the two go their separate ways, and Venom finds its way to a costumed rave where it gives a speech about being kept hidden away (“Stop this cruel treatment of aliens”), which the cheering attendees receive as one about acceptance. There’s a universe in which that scene satirizes toothless social-justice affirmations so vague they could apply to queerness or to creatures who just want to be free to eat brains. But Venom: Let There Be Carnage can’t really decide what the joke is beyond the absurdity of the scenario and just lets the moment hang there, curiously flat. It seems aware that the sequence doesn’t matter — that, in fact, nothing in the movie matters aside from the mid-credits scene that brought down the house at the fan screening I attended. It was all anyone talked about as we exited the theater, as though everything that had come before had already faded from memory. We should all be so lucky.

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a must-see piece of chaotic joy

Director Andy Serkis delivers unbridled madness in this sequel to 2018’s Venom .

With a title like “there will be carnage,” what sounds like a threat becomes a promise.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage , a sequel to the unexpected hit Venom from 2018, continues the adventures of Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock and his alien parasite companion. But tonally, Let There Be Carnage body slams the reset button. First, the movie is a riotous bro-mantic comedy driven by manic energy and explicit queer subtext.

“I am out of the Eddie closet,” boasts Venom on a night out in San Francisco with rainbow glow sticks adorned on his neck.

Along with its subtext, the inclusion of Woody Harrelson as the villain and acclaimed VFX actor Andy Serkis in the director’s chair, the Venom sequel defies the self-serious superheroics that informed the first movie. Let There Be Carnage results in unbridled cinematic chaos that surpasses its limitations to deliver on its very title. Whether that’s a promise or a threat is up to you.

Tom Hardy returns as both Eddie Brock and Venom's alien parasite, who wants nothing more than to feast on bad guys.

It’s been a few years since Venom , and little has changed for brawny journalist Eddie Brock (Hardy). While an exclusive interview with serial killer Cletus Kasady (Harrelson) has restored Eddie’s professional reputation, he’s still single and living in a sloppy pigsty with Venom, whose cravings for bad guys’ brains is becoming insatiable — and intolerable.

But when Cletus comes in contact with Eddie’s symbiote blood, Cletus manifests his own symbiote companion, the red offspring Carnage. After breaking out his imprisoned lover Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris, Skyfall ), who has the destructive power of sonic screams, Eddie and Venom work to get over their quarrels to prevent, well, it’s in the title: carnage.

“Let There Be Carnage is refreshing counter-programming to the mostly ascetic superhero genre.”

If the 2018 Venom was a gritty action-horror with flashes of absurd comedy, Let There Be Carnage is its opposite. And it’s spiritually what these movies ought to be. With a metaphorically gay Eddie and Venom as the emotional center, Let There Be Carnage is refreshing counter-programming to the mostly ascetic superhero genre and a substitute meal for the dearth of studio romantic comedies in this age.

No, Carnage is not a steamy movie, and a returning Michelle Williams as Eddie’s ex Anne has a presence primarily reduced to affirm Eddie’s human heterosexuality. But Eddie and Venom are without question the Marvel Universe’s Odd Couple, or Bert and Ernie. We’re all the better with Venom making a messy breakfast .

Woody Harrelson (right) stars as Cletus Kasady, a serial killer who becomes the title villain “Carnage.”

On paper, Let There Be Carnage sounds ripe for disaster. But through the symbiosis of writer Kelly Marcel’s chaotic neutral script, the handsomely brutish Tom Hardy’s performance, and Andy Serkis’ confident directing, Let There Be Carnage embraces its inherent meme-ready absurdity to deliver something welcomingly unique than derivative.

What’s most impressive about Carnage is when and how it does take things seriously. In Carnage’s introduction, he is a bone-chilling menace whose high-fidelity appearance is an achievement on par with Serkis’ own on Lord of the Rings . The final confrontation between Carnage and Venom is also high-octane, demonstrating fine action and VFX craftsmanship.

Serkis’ years playing Gollum, King Kong, and Planet of the Apes’ Caesar proves fruitful for a VFX-heavy film like Let There Be Carnage. The movie overcomes its natural limits and implements intelligible composition and raw physicality that renders the action easy to follow. At the least, Venom and Carnage look like two distinguishable entities. Given that we’re dealing with powers that amount to little more than “Oops! All goo!” it’s shocking how clean everything looks.

Despite the inherent mess both Venom and Carnage are capable of, Let There Be Carnage is impressively clean in its action choreography and image composition.

If there are weak spots in Carnage , they are, sadly, Harrelson and Harris. Although they are more fun than Riz Ahmed’s sleepwalking villain from 2018, Harrelson under-delivers in a role that’s one application of clown makeup away from reminding you of better characters. Cletus is philosophically confusing and inert; even addressing his contradictions in the dialogue does little to remedy his shortcomings.

“Venom: Let There Be Carnage understands its assignment.”

Harris’ Frances, also “Shriek,” is even more troublesome as a motivator for Cletus. She is interchangeable with an inanimate object. Both villains of Carnage are tragic figures, but the movie spends next to no time encouraging empathy or fostering depth. When Venom declares, “Fuck this guy!” it’s less triumphant than it is stating the obvious.

To quote a prominent meme: Venom: Let There Be Carnage understands its assignment . (Think Taika Waititi reinventing Thor in Ragnarok and you’ll get the idea . ) Though it is clunky and stupid — a new part of broadcast reporting is dishing out background exposition, it seems — it’s charmingly so, as it cements its lead two characters as modern cinema’s oddball couple.

To demand more than what the movie delivers is foolish. Venom is doing more than what is asked, in the case of its breakneck-yet-comprehensible action and anarchic humor. Could Venom be a smarter franchise of action-horror? Sure. But where’s the fun in that?

Venom: Let There Be Carnage opens in theaters on October 1.

This article was originally published on Sep. 30, 2021

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I was not a big fan of 2018’s Venom , a film that I felt was far too bogged down in its self-serious, gritty elements to truly take advantage of its more outlandish moments. Thankfully, the sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage , knows that the title character is at his best when you just let him be a total goofball, and so at a scant 90 minutes the movie is really more of a buddy comedy that happens to have some superhero action in it. When so many superhero movies are getting loaded down with mythology and exposition, it’s kind of a relief to see Eddie Brock ( Tom Hardy ) and his alien symbiote Venom (voiced by Hardy) banter about what Venom is and isn’t allowed to eat. It’s not much of a film, but it is a pleasant enough distraction that makes you wish Sony would go ahead and just forget the superhero stuff entirely and just have Eddie and Venom in a remake of The Odd Couple .

Eddie and Venom still aren’t really getting along. They’ve established an uneasy rapport where Venom wants to eat people, and Eddie only allows the angry, wise-cracking alien to eat chocolate and chickens. Meanwhile, Eddie is trying to put his life back together even though the woman he loves, Anne ( Michelle Williams ), is going to marry the milquetoast Dan ( Reid Scott ). Eddie thinks he can maybe get his journalism career back on track if he interviews notorious serial killer Cletus Kasady ( Woody Harrelson ), but before Cletus’ execution, the murderer bites Eddie and absorbs his symbiote power, thus becoming a more dangerous version dubbed “Carnage.” Carnage and Cletus make an agreement—if Carnage helps Cletus reunite with his childhood love Frances ( Naomie Harris ), who has the power to deliver supersonic shockwaves with her voice, then Cletus will help Carnage kill Venom.

RELATED: Woody Harrelson on ‘Venom: Let There Be Carnage’ and What Happened To His Beautiful, Flawless Wig from the First Film

So many other movies, especially superhero movies, would stop to take time to explain certain things like, “Why is a red symbiote more dangerous?” and “Why does Carnage want to kill Venom?” and Venom: Let There Be Carnage could not care less about answering these questions. The film moves at a breakneck speed with little interest in the “why” of it all and instead resolves to have fun at all costs. That means you get scenes of Harrelson chewing the scenery and Carnage chewing up random people while the other half of the film is a break-up/make-up story between Eddie and Venom. The highlight of the film is when Venom decides to go off on his own and ends up at a rave where he gives an LGTBQ+ metaphor speech about needing to be out and proud for who he is. In a regular movie, this would be part of an arc—that Venom doesn’t want to be hidden away from the world and suppressed in Eddie. In Let There Be Carnage , it’s played for laughs (which it gets) and then Venom goes back to Eddie so they can inevitably fight Carnage.

The superhero stuff is the least interesting part of the movie because it’s just two CGI things bouncing into each other, and for a film that’s has a colorful personality between its characters, the color palette is surprisingly muted. Instead of being the gorgeous crimson red of the comics, Carnage is almost a pale, fleshy color that does nothing to pop against the greyish background. Let There Be Carnage comes so close to realizing its full potential, but it occasionally slips back into the dull grittiness of the first movie, and where it truly lives is in watching Eddie and Venom interact with each other and the world around them to maximum silliness. I’m also surprised the film isn’t rated R considering the outlandish tone (and the success of Deadpool since studios love ripping each other off).

I suppose if you like your comic book movies to play it a little straighter, then Let There Be Carnage will be frustrating. It’s not a raunchy comedy like Deadpool nor is it a darker superhero picture like Batman. It exists awkwardly in between, but at least by leaning more towards comedy, you get an entertaining albeit instantly forgettable picture where a muscular CGI alien fires off quips. When he has to fight the other CGI thing, I instantly lost interest because this is not a movie about character or story but vibes. Perhaps you could counter that we should demand more from our movies, but I’d say we have no shortage of superhero movies with higher aspirations. At least Venom: Let There Be Carnage has the courtesy to be as fun as it is disposable.

KEEP READING: 'Venom 2:' Carnage Is Unleashed in New Clip From Sequel

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Movie Review: Venom: Let There Be Carnage

by David Mumpower · October 8, 2021

In 2018, I watched a movie that I disliked so much I almost turned it off.

I’m not into hate-watching things, even as a film critic. If something isn’t working for me, I’ll cut the cord and try something else. I prefer to celebrate the positive.

Photo: Sony Pictures

However, the name of the film was Venom, and Venom hadn’t played a big part in the movie yet.

So, I gave it a longer chance and was so glad that I did. The second half of Venom was absolutely hysterical and had me hyped for a sequel.

Venom (2018). Photo: Sony Pictures

So, here’s my review of Venom: Let There Be Carnage , which is 100 percent more of the same in a (mostly) good way.

The Story of Venom 2

Eddie Brock is an investigative journalist who frankly isn’t very good at his job. He’s also balancing a relationship with his attorney fiancée, Anne.

The reporter snoops around too much, leading to him losing his job. Even worse, his actions lead to Anne’s termination. Obviously, they break up.

Don’t worry, though! Eddie quickly develops a new toxic relationship with an intergalactic symbiote nicknamed Venom.

During a mid-credits scene in the first film, a serial killer named Cletus Kasady invites Brock to interview him. Kasady promises…Carnage.

Woody Harrelson as Cletus Kasady in Venom (2018). Photo: Sony Pictures

The sequel starts where its predecessor ended. First, we learn about Kasady’s sordid history, which doesn’t involve a happy ending for his immediate family.

At some point during the movie, events transpire that involve, well, biting. At that moment, Kasady gains his own symbiote, a “red one” named Carnage.

Even Venom acts reticent to engage with a “red one” in battle, believing that it’s an apex predator.

So, the story here is basically that an incompetent journalist with an underpowered symbiote, relatively speaking, faces off against a serial killer and a scary monster.

The Characters of Venom 2

Venom included a smaller cast, and even that grouping gets stripped down in the sequel.

Beyond Brock and Kasady, Anne also returns. Unfortunately, she’s still with her new boyfriend from the previous film, Doctor Dan.

Doctor Dan, Anne, Eddie. Photo: Sony Pictures

Also, comic book character Patrick Mulligan appears in this film, which is significant if you know the character.

A symbiote named Toxin merges with Mulligan; Toxin is Carnage’s offspring and thereby the grandchild of Venom.

Extreme Carnage Toxin #1 by Skan. Photo: Marvel Comics

The other new comic book arrival comes in the form of Frances Barrison, aka Shriek.

Surprisingly, Shriek and Carnage’s relationship mirrors the comic version closely.

With a title like this, you might expect plenty of creative license with Carnage and everyone who comes into contact with him.

That’s not the case here. Instead, if you know the story, you’ll watch it unfold on the big screen, which is quite satisfying to 1990s era comic book fans.

From Spider-Man Unlimited #1 (1993) by Tom DeFalco, Ron Lim, Jim Sanders III, Chris Eliopoulos, and Nel Yomtov. Photo: Marvel Comics

I’m not one of them, but I heard plenty of satisfied groupies on the way out of the theater afterward.

I admire that Andy Serkis (yes, Gollum) doesn’t feel the need to tweak a good story for his own needs. That’s quiet confidence he’s demonstrating here.

Andy Serkis as Gollum. Photo: The Indian Express

Still, for me, the thrill was in watching two of my favorite actors, Woody Harrelson and Naomie Harris, in a Natural Born Killers scenario.

Yes, Harrelson is rehashing old territory, but nobody’s complaining. As for Harris, her role is somewhat underwritten. She’s always fantastic, though.

My Review of Venom 2

Let There Be Carnage follows the same ground as Venom. The film lives and dies based on the symbiotic relationship between the characters.

Eddie and Venom have spent too much time together in the same skin and would like a break from one another.

Meanwhile, Kasady and Carnage are still in the honeymoon phase of their relationship. It’s a crazy time when murderers fall in love and kill everything in sight.

At 90 minutes, this film is light on story, too. First, we meet Kasady and learn about him. Then, we watch how much trouble Venom has caused for Eddie.

From Spider-Man Unlimited #1. Photo: Marvel Comics

Shriek acts crazy, Anne still feels drawn to Eddie, and Dr. Dan remains an insensitive jerk.

There’s nothing original here. If anything, this is one of the most underdeveloped Marvel movies in a decade.

That’s not all bad, though. Let There Be Carnage works like an old Tom & Jerry cartoon.

In fact, actor Tom Hardy describes his portrayal of Brock/Venom as Ren and Stimpy.

Mic Drop Venom. Photo: Sony Pictures

So, we’re not talking about a nuanced film here. Instead, it’s slapstick comedy interspersed with extreme violence.

Not everyone will like it, but I will say that the sequel is leaps and bounds more watchable and consistent than Venom.

The Anne and Dan characters in that film were woefully cliched and took me out of the film when they were on screen. And that’s Michelle Williams I’m talking about! She’s a talent!

Thankfully, Serkis attacks the prior flaw by giving some depth to the two characters, especially Dr. Dan. He actually shows some spine this time!

Still, the paper-thin plot combined with the ridiculous action scene at the end of the movie holds it back from greatness.

Final Thoughts

The pandemic has made me appreciate the value of escapism. Unfortunately, I’ve taken that for granted too often with cinema.

Super-muscular 44-year-old Tom Hardy fought gangly 60-year-old stoner Woody Harrelson in a fight. I plausibly believed it was a mismatch in Woody’s favor.

Venom 2. Photo: Sony Pictures

Two symbiotes that looked eerily similar save for coloration and resting appendages fought to the death, and I believed the red one was superior for no good reason.

That’s a sure sign that the story worked well enough for me to suspend disbelief.

I also want to credit Serkis for showing Carnage’s crippling weaknesses during its first appearance. That’s clever storytelling.

I’m not ready to call Venom: Let There Be Carnage a great movie. In truth, it’s probably closer to a bad movie that I love.

Shriek and Carnage: Natural Born Killers. Photo: Sony Pictures

Still, I left the theater happy that day because Venom 2 delivered on its promise. I’d call that a B+ but also a title I’m expecting to rewatch a lot.

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage review: Sometimes the sequel is WAY better

Venom's origin story is complete, just in time for things to get interesting in the post-credits scene.

• Author of Taking your Android Tablets to the Max

Venom: Let There Be Carnage brings back Marvel's toothy menace.

As origin stories go, the original Venom film was fine . The Spider-Man-adjacent Marvel supervillain spin-off introduced major names you need to remember, had a healthy mix of action with comedy and ended on a high note. The one thing we didn't get was a solidified identity for our antihero, so while some were excited to see a sequel with an even bigger, badder villain to fight, I was most psyched to see Venom actually become the lethal protector comics fans know and love.

And fortunately for everyone, I'm delighted to say you get what you came for with this sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

Let There Be Carnage opens today, Oct. 1, in the US, followed by Oct. 15 in the UK, while Australia has to wait until Nov. 25. The sequel picks up not long after the original 2018 Venom movie left off, with Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) trying to be a written-word journalist instead of a video host despite the distraction of an alien symbiote bonded to him, as originally seen in Marvel's Spider-Man comics. The previous movie ended with the "We are Venom" line that made so many giggle with delight, but that unity was short-lived. 

Eddie wants to keep Venom happy with special chocolate-containing chemicals that will help Venom survive without eating Eddie from the inside out. Unfortunately for him, Venom is keen to get those chemicals from the brains of bad guys. This disequilibrium causes a lot of problems for Eddie in his professional life, which reaches a fever pitch when the police repeatedly respond to the request of the locked up serial killer Cletus Kassidy (Woody Harrelson). 

Read More:  What to remember before watching Venom: Let There Be Carnage

Just as Tom Hardy is the ideal fit for the role of Eddie Brock, Woody Harrelson could not be more perfect as Cletus Kassidy. We saw a tantalizing glimpse of this off-kilter performance at the end of the first Venom film, but Harrelson truly delivers in the sequel. Everything from his dramatic changes in pitch to his unsettling body movements and even his weird haircut come together to form a character that isn't physically threatening but is nonetheless chilling.

Kassidy wants nothing more than to spend another day on this planet with his childhood love and fellow violent psycho Frances Barrison, known in the comics as the mutant Shriek due to her sonic capabilities. While Shriek is never called by name or deliberately labeled as a mutant in this film, the powers are there and used very well throughout the film. 

Eddie's efforts to force Venom to fall in line with what he needs to feel like a normal and productive member of society backfire spectacularly, accidentally creating the symbiote offspring Carnage inside Kassidy. Where Eddie isn't keen to hurt anyone and Venom is happy to only hurt wrongdoers, Carnage and Kassidy have neither of those limitations and the result is extremely violent. At least, it would be if this movie wasn't rated PG-13. As a result, much of the actual carnage is done through bloodless body slams and lots of property destruction with the occasional implied eating of heads. In truth, demonstrating that Carnage is a lot more violent and messy than Venom is challenging under these limitations, and in some scenes your imagination is doing most of the heavy lifting. There's also some awkwardness in the definition of Carnage's abilities, at one point inserting itself into a laptop and hacking a government database to advance the plot. 

• Venom: Let There Be Carnage: What to remember before watching
• HBO Max won't be streaming Venom 2, sorry (and Disney Plus won't either)

The movie truly shines in its well-timed moments of emotion, and in the fight between Venom and Carnage. The relationship between Eddie and Venom is treated like an actual relationship, and while director Andy Serkis largely depicts this through a comedic lens it still leaves you with a warm happy feeling. And in the middle of this couple breaking up and getting back together, two giant aliens beat the stuffing out of one another -- which is beautiful in a different way. 

A great deal of time is spent on whether it's more important to be the strongest physically or the strongest as a team, and while most superhero movies deliver this message in the most ham-fisted way possible Let There Be Carnage actually carries some onscreen emotional charge in between the shattered pillars and stabby sound effects. 

It's rare for a sequel to outperform the original, but Venom: Let There Be Carnage does so in every possible way. It's funnier by a mile, the action is much improved and the overall story is considerably more compelling. Plus this movie actually finishes the origin story framework started in the first film, with our main character finally deciding to be the "the lethal protector" anti-hero Venom. If you liked the first movie, you're going to love this sequel. And if you weren't totally sold on the original Venom, there's every chance you'll like this movie a lot more. 

Go see this film, and stick around for the end-credits scene because it's going to make Venom fans happy . 

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• DVD & Streaming

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

• Action/Adventure , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

• October 1, 2021
• Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock/Venom; Woody Harrelson as Cletus Kasady/Carnage; Michelle Williams as Anne Weying; Naomie Harris as Frances Barrison; Reid Scott as Dr. Dan Lewis; Stephen Graham as Detective Mulligan; Peggy Lu as Mrs. Chen

Home Release Date

• November 23, 2021
• Andy Serkis

Distributor

• Columbia Pictures

Movie Review

Venom is bored .

Perhaps that seems unimportant. But considering Venom is a multi-toothed, head-eating, alien symbiote, it’s a pretty big deal. Because the more irritated Venom gets, the more likely he is to go off on a killing spree.

Eddie Brock, his human host, has had to lay low since the events of the first Venom flick. (Police find the fact that Eddie knew absolutely nothing about the massive body count that was following him around the city mighty convenient.) So that means no eating people, no killing people, no destruction, fighting or mayhem-causing of any kind!

Easier said than done when your natural diet consists of brains .

To make matters worse, Cletus Kasady (a serial killer whom Eddie helped put behind bars back when he was still a video journalist), wants to talk to Eddie. He wants his life story told—or so he claims .

The meeting doesn’t go well. And it leads to a series of events that allows Kasady to bite Eddie and get a taste of Venom’s blood .

That blood turns into a red symbiote similar to Venom—a sort of child —only it’s much, much more powerful. (And therefore, much, much more bloodthirsty.)

Kasady escapes prison with his new parasitic friend, named Carnage. And carnage is certainly what follows them.

Only Eddie and Venom can stop Kasady and Carnage. But by this time, Eddie and his symbiote alien have gone their separate ways after a bad fight. They’ll have to reconcile their differences quickly (again, easier said than done since one of them has practically redefined the term “hangry”) if they want to save themselves and the planet from Carnage.

Positive Elements

Venom and Eddie’s symbiotic relationship has its pros and cons. On one hand, Venom protects Eddie from physical harm. On the other, he’s often the reason Eddie is in danger in the first place. But Venom is also concerned about Eddie’s mental wellbeing.

When Anne, Eddie’s ex-fiancée, tells Eddie that she’s marrying someone else, Venom is just as heartbroken as his host. He offers to kill Anne’s future husband and tries to get them back together several times. Venom also helps Eddie restore his career (which was ruined by the previous film’s baddie).

But Eddie’s insistence that the pair must lay low really drags on Venom. He’s agreed to not eat people, but he needs something more . To quote another Marvel flick (and one that’s closely related to the Venom storyline): “With great power comes great responsibility.” Venom wants to protect the city, but Eddie fears that they’ll be carted off to Area 51 if anyone discovers what they are.

Eventually, Eddie and Venom realize that the only way their relationship works is when they work together as one unit instead of as two separate entities sharing a body. They have to align their goals and desires to be a good match. (And this alignment is what allows them to save Anne’s life.)

Another person of note, whom Paul Asay called the “most admirable character” in his review of the first Venom , is Dan, Anne’s doctor fiancé. Dan once again demonstrates that he’s just an all-around nice guy. He supports Anne as she tries to help Eddie, despite their shaky past, and he even helps in the fight against Carnage.

Spiritual Elements

Frances Barrison (Kasady’s long-lost love) and Kasady kidnap a priest and get married in an unconventional wedding ceremony inside a cathedral. (Frances wears black instead of white, and the couple opts to include murder as a wedding gift to each other.) Kasady also frequently calls her his “angel.” We also see carvings of crosses on the walls of Kasady’s prison cell.

Frances also has a genetic mutation which gives her the power of sonic screams. A man’s eyes mysteriously glow blue, and it appears that some unknown power has awakened within him.

Sexual Content

Frances and Kasady make out several times. An animated sketch shows a woman’s bare behind. When Venom possesses Anne, his alien form assumes a distinctly feminine silhouette.

Eddie later hugs Anne to transfer Venom back to him, and Venom tries to get them to kiss. Eddie walks into a women’s restroom, and a woman sitting in a stall (fully clothed but on her phone) peeks under when she hears his voice.

An effeminate man can be spotted in a nightclub where many people are dancing. Anne calls Venom “sexy” in an attempt to flatter him. We see a near-naked corpse on the ground.

Violent Content

“Let There Be Carnage” is an appropriate subtitle for this sequel.

In the first film, Venom and the other aliens used their ooey-gooey alien limbs to toss around bad guys and police officers alike. They battled each other in a jello-y, CGI mess. And they used their many teeth to bite off the heads of their victims. That’s all continued here.

Venom follows the rules to not eat humans, but that doesn’t mean he won’t rough up a few of them. And he certainly loves to threaten bodily harm. (He also begs Eddie for permission to eat the inmates at a prison.)

However, despite his agreement to not eat anyone, he still inadvertently kills several while body-jumping in a sort of human-host joyride. He and Eddie also give each other quite the bruising when they get into a fight. (Venom breaks Eddie’s nose and heals it just to break it again.)

Carnage, however, has made no such promises of “good” behavior. During his and Kasady’s prison escape, he kills and mutilates every guard (but oddly leaves the prisoners alone, possibly at Kasady’s behest). When breaking Frances out of prison later, he hangs the lead psychiatrist, and we see the woman’s legs kicking feebly in the background. He bites the head off the priest who weds Frances and Kasady. And sometimes he just kills for fun, throwing a truck into a river when it doesn’t drive fast enough.

We learn that Carnage can only survive if he kills his “father,” Venom. This ensuing battle shows the two shapeshifting symbiote stabbing each other with spike-like limbs. Several people (including their hosts) fall from great heights, and those who aren’t rescued by the aliens die.

Sounds of a certain frequency are fatal to the symbiotes. So, when Frances uses her screeching abilities, Carnage brutally beats her. And after several threats to rip her face off, he attempts to kill her, despite Kasady’s pleas.

But the aliens aren’t the only violent ones in this film. Kasady narrates his childhood (accompanied by several animated sketches). He nearly died when he was born, but he was resuscitated. He killed his grandmother by pushing her down the stairs. He killed his mom by throwing a hairdryer into the shower she was using. He was beaten by his mother, father, grandmother and the other children at the juvenile center he was sent to.

Of course, Kasady becomes a serial killer. And after the bodies of his victims are found, the state reinstates the death penalty for him. (We see the beginning of a lethal injection execution.)

As a teenager, Frances is roughly handled by guards during a prison transfer. She tries to escape, using her sonic scream to wreck the van carrying her (seemingly killing the cops riding up front and permanently damaging the eardrum of another). But she gets shot in the eye, and we later see her scarred face.

After Kasady sets Frances free, she vows revenge on the cop who shot her. (The man is abducted by Kasady and thrown in the trunk of a car.) She beats up him, shoves her thumb into his eye, wraps a chain around his neck, temporarily hangs him and finally kicks him off a building onto a partition below.

Crude or Profane Language

There is a single f-word, as well as 10 uses of the s-word. “A–,” “a–hole,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “d–k,” “h—” and “p—y” are also heard. Venom uses Eddie’s hands to repeatedly type “dik” on the computer. He also makes a crude hand gesture toward Eddie. God’s name is abused three times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Someone drinks wine.

Other Negative Elements

We learn that Kasady’s fascination with Eddie wasn’t because Eddie exposed him but rather because he related to Eddie. He felt they were both emotionally orphaned (Eddie’s own dad couldn’t look at his son after his wife died giving birth to him). And in a way, they are two sides of the same coin—scared little boys whom nobody cared about or came to save.

Venom is narcissistic, telling Eddie that before he came along, Eddie was a loser. Venom says he’s the only special thing about Eddie.

There are instances of blackmail, lying, stealing and breaking out of prison. Someone vomits. Kasady licks up spider guts after squashing it.

Honestly, I question why we needed this second Venom film (or even the first for that matter). There are way better superhero movies out there, with better messages and better fight scenes.

The carnage we witness onscreen has no payoff. At times, it’s actually boring, which begs the question: Why was there so much murder and fighting? Because between the pile up of bodies and bad language, there’s not even a meaningful story here.

Venom, while providing a comical inner dialogue, is awful . He fully believes that he is the single greatest thing to happen in Eddie’s life. And even though he appreciates that Eddie is letting him ride along rent-free, he makes every social situation awkward, puts Eddie in physical danger and threatens to eat every living creature that comes in Eddie’s path.

A post-credits cut scene indicates how Venom (who is also a villain in the Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies) will join the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the upcoming Spiderman: No Way Home. Which means the problems we’ve seen here will eventually find a bigger audience in the MCU.

Emily Tsiao

Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.

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Everything We Know

Everything we know about venom: let there be carnage, who's returning (hey, mrs. chen), who's new, and what are the odds this will somehow cross over with marvel's spider-man we break it all down..

TAGGED AS: comic , Comic Book , comic books , comics , Film , films , Marvel , movie , movies , spider-man , superhero , Superheroes

While Marvel Studio pictures appear with a clockwork precision that only a worldwide pandemic could pause, Sony’s attempts to make use of the Spider-Man characters it controls have been less reliable. Amid multiple restarts, a long-in-the-works plan to make a Sinister Six movie, and a critical hack of Sony’s email system a few years back, it’s no wonder they chose to ally with Marvel Studios to bring Spidey to the MCU.

But Sony also continued to develop ideas independent of Peter Parker’s (Tom Holland) trip to the larger Marvel world. Occasionally known as the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters, the concept finally clicked with the one-two punch of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse   and Venom . Both were commercial successes and proved Sony could mount a Spider-Man(-adjacent) film without Marvel’s help.

Provided, of course, they’re still interested in going it alone.

Now, after its own COVID delay, the first true installment of the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters begins with Venom: Let There Be Carnage . If the recently released trailer is any indication, it should succeed in similar ways to its predecessor despite a new creative at the helm (more on that in a moment), but will it truly set the, er, “SPUMC” reality apart from the MCU? Let’s take a look at what we know about Venom: Let There Be Carnage to see if we can discover where the film exists in the many Marvel Universes.

Familiar Faces

(Photo by ©Columbia Pictures)

It is fair to say one of the primary reasons for the first Venom ’s success was the surprising double act of Eddie Brock and the symbiote on his back known as Venom, both played by Tom Hardy ; happily, Hardy was the first element secured for the sequel. Of course, these days, studios sign actors up for multi-picture deals just in case, but with Venom , Hardy’s return for Let There Be Carnage and an eventual third film is essential.

Sure, Venom could find a new host. He has passed to others before, including Eddie’s ex-girlfriend Anne Weying ( Michelle Williams ), who also returns for Let There Be Carnage . Reid Scott also returns as Anne’s incredibly likable current boyfriend, Dr. Dan Lewis. And as the recent trailer made clear, Peggy Lu is back as neighborhood convenience store proprietor, Mrs. Chen – as it happens, she, Eddie, and Venom have worked out some sort of protection deal so she doesn’t get held up as often. Although, the trailer suggests that deal is still tenuous, as Venom is always looking to make a meal of the nearest non-Eddie human.

And, oddly, that’s pretty much all the returning cast Sony could really import from the first film. Characters played by the likes of Riz Ahmed and Jenny Slate did not make it out of that story alive. That said, there is one character who made a brief appearance returning for the sequel in a big way. Woody Harrelson’ s Cletus Kasady – seen for a moment in Venom ’s mid-credit stinger – is the primary antagonist this time around. From the trailer, it appears his execution date is approaching. It also seems it will not go well, as it activates another alien symbiote called Carnage.

(Photo by Sony Pictures Entertainment)

Or, at least, that’s one interpretation. In the comics, Carnage was the disregarded offspring of Venom who found a kindred spirit in serial killer Kasady. Together they did plenty of damage and battled Venom, Spider-Man, and anyone else who got in their way. It will be interesting to see if this Carnage is also the offspring of movie Venom and whether or not his initial indifference to his child will be a point of contention between him and Eddie. That said, now that they share Eddie’s impossibly large San Francisco apartment, there still needs to be some conflict between them.

Behind the camera, the producing team of Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, and Amy Pascal – of The Amazing Spider-Man   duology — return, as do Hardy and Kelly Marcel as executive producers.

The Fresh Hosts

Whether or not you consider Harrelson a new member of the cast, there are a handful of other freshmen to the Venom family. Naomie Harris joins up as Frances Barrison, a young woman whose encounter with the symbiote known as Shriek will lead her to Kasady before too long. Stephen Graham plays Mulligan, reportedly a detective looking to link Eddie to Kasady in the hopes of finding the location of victims the killer chose not to reveal — although, in the comics, Mulligan has his own symbiote issues to deal with. Sean Delaney and Larry Olubamiwo are also set to appear in smaller roles. Delaney even claimed his is a literal “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” moment.

But perhaps the biggest name to join the franchise is not a new actor, but the new director. Due to scheduling difficulties with his commitments to Zombieland: Double Tap , director Ruben Fleischer stepped away from Let There Be Carnage . Sony quickly launched a search for a new filmmaker and found Andy Serkis .

Yes, you read that right, the man who brought Gollum to life in The Lord of the Rings   trilogy directed Venom 2. As it happens, Serkis began directing features with the 2017 biopic Breathe , starring former Spider-Man Andrew Garfield . The next year, Netflix released his second film, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle – which had the misfortune of arriving on the scene after Jon Favreau’s remake of the Disney animated version. Nevertheless, Sony and the film’s producers went with him because of his extensive knowledge of motion capture technology and performance.

(Photo by Priscilla Grant/Everett Collection)

Backing Serkis up on screenwriting duties is Marcel, who replaces Jeff Pinker . The Saving Mr. Banks   co-writer wrote the script after hashing out a story with fellow EP Hardy. Hutch Parker , a veteran of Fox Marvel movies like X-Men: Days of Future Past and Logan , is also an executive producer on the film. Other crewmembers include Breathe  and Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood ’ s Robert Richardson as director of photography, production designer Oliver Scholl, and composer Marco Beltrami.

This new company of talents will tell a further tale of Eddie and Venom becoming besties – in fact, Tolmach, Hardy, and Fleischer (before he confirmed his departure) all emphasized the buddy movie feeling would be amplified this time around. Meanwhile, they will also have to face the threat of Carnage, Shriek, and whatever other symbiote terrors may yet emerge as part of the plot. Thanks to Venom’s popularity in the 1990s and today, there are plenty of his fellow goo-monsters out there waiting for their chance on the big screen.

Well, provided Venom doesn’t face Peter Parker first.

The Madness of the Marvel Multiverse

Eagle-eyed watchers of the Let There Be Carnage trailer took note of a partially obscured headline during a shot in which Graham’s detective character is reading the Daily Bugle : “ENGERS L IGHT M.” The potential meaning of the first word in that headline is clear — Marvel superheroes exist in Venom’s world. But are they same Av-“ENGERS” we’ve come to love thanks to films like Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy ?

After a contentious renegotiation of the film rights to Spider-Man in 2019, it is unclear if Disney and Sony are chummy enough to share characters with more abandon. But at the same time, a 2020 trailer for the much-delayed SPUMC film Morbius  ( read more about that here ) featured references to Spidey’s current problems in the MCU and an appearance by Michael Keaton as (presumably) Adrian Toomes from Spider-Man: Homecoming . Also, Serkis has said the characters in Venom are aware of Spider-Man, and more recently, Sony struck a deal to bring the Spider-Man films to Disney+, so the relationship may be warm enough for more cross-company cooperation.

Oh, but then there’s the Bugle itself. Since the newspaper is part of the wider Spider-Man license, it did not appear in the MCU until the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home , where it was the name of J. Jonah Jameson’s ( J.K. Simmons ) conspiracy theory website. The Bugle ‘s usual print dimensions and trade dress in the the Carnage trailer suggests we are still dealing with two separate film universes.

To a certain extent, the Carnage and Morbius trailers are having a laugh with the asides to the MCU, but it is also possible a clearer narrative understanding will come to light once Spider-Man: No Way Home   is released in December. Since that film will feature appearances by Sony Spider-Man characters like Doctor Octopus ( Alfred Molina ), Electro ( Jamie Foxx ), and further references to the Multiverse, it is not outside the realm of possibility that Let There Be Carnage ’s relative distance from the MCU will be explored in some way. At the moment, we’re inclined to believe Eddie and Venom’s adventure occur in a universe or two away from the prime MCU reality, but it could be the place Peter ends up calling home. That’s probably a good thing, as there are five other live-action Spider-Man related projects at Sony in need of a webslinger to tie the whole thing together.

As for now, Let There Be Carnage ’s references to Spider-Men and the Avengers will probably remain joke fodder.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage releases on September 24, 2021.

Thumbnail image by Sony Pictures Entertainment

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Venom: let there be carnage, common sense media reviewers.

Noisy violence and forced comedy in poor super-sequel.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

In a way, the movie is largely about teamwork, as

There's more of an attempt in this sequel to turn

Frances Barrison, a Black woman, is the only centr

Mass destruction. Many minor characters killed. Vi

Brief passionate kissing. In an animated flashback

A use of "f--k," several uses of "s--t," plus "a--

Some offline merchandising, but less than with oth

Parents need to know that Venom: Let There Be Carnage is the sequel to 2018's Venom , with Tom Hardy returning as Eddie, the reporter who's also host to a scary, fanged alien symbiote known as Venom (the character was originally an enemy of Spider-Man). Like the first movie, this one suffers from…

Positive Messages

In a way, the movie is largely about teamwork, as Eddie and Venom are symbiotic and Cletus and Carnage (it turns out) are not. The characters who work together, including the non-powered civilians, tend to get an upper hand on the villains who can't. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't really talk about the downsides of the symbiosis between Venom and Eddie, instead making a poor attempt at comedy with lots of shouting and arguing.

Positive Role Models

There's more of an attempt in this sequel to turn Venom into a hero; i.e., he wants to kill humans, but he can subsist on chickens and chocolate. Eddie is strict with him about sticking to these rules. They seem to be trying to be better people than they were in the first movie, but they're still involved in tons of destruction and lots of death with few, or no, consequences.

Diverse Representations

Frances Barrison, a Black woman, is the only central character of color. Her super-power, a destructive shriek, has made her an outcast and a prisoner her whole life. She shows strength, but she's not well developed and is unquestionably a villain; she's also always shown experiencing violence/trauma/harm. The only other person of color in the cast is Mrs. Chen, a convenience store owner who knows about Venom. She shows kindness, but her characterization also leans toward stereotype. Anne doesn't get to do very much at all, just as in the first movie.

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Violence & Scariness

Mass destruction. Many minor characters killed. Violent monsters. Headless body. Someone kicks a store clerk in the head and stomps on their body (offscreen, below counter). Animated flashback sequence depicts a child pushing his grandmother down the stairs, killing his mother with a hairdryer in the bathtub, and being abused by both his father and bullies. Lots of fighting, smashing, mass destruction, pounding, etc. Strangling, biting. Squishing someone's eye with thumb. Venom bites a man's head off. Woman shot, thrown out of moving truck. A woman is abused by her love interest. Brief jump-scare. Venom is very scary to look at, with his vicious fangs and overall menacing appearance. The plot includes the fact that a convicted murderer has been condemned to death; a scene shows prison guards starting to administer lethal injection.

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Sex, Romance & Nudity

Brief passionate kissing. In an animated flashback, a cartoon woman's naked bottom is briefly shown. A woman tells Venom he's sexy.

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A use of "f--k," several uses of "s--t," plus "a--hole," "ass," "p---y," "bitch/son of a bitch," "goddamn," "hell," "d--k," "crapola," "sphincter." Middle-finger gesture.

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Products & Purchases

Some offline merchandising, but less than with other similar properties.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Venom: Let There Be Carnage is the sequel to 2018's Venom , with Tom Hardy returning as Eddie, the reporter who's also host to a scary, fanged alien symbiote known as Venom (the character was originally an enemy of Spider-Man ). Like the first movie, this one suffers from forced humor, shouting, and lots of noisy smashing. Violence includes mass destruction, many minor characters being killed in bloodless ways, fighting, smashing, pounding, brutal attacks, eye-gouging, strangling, biting, bullying, and some guns and shooting. An animated flashback shows the worst violence, in cartoon form: murders, abuse, and bullying. Two characters kiss briefly but passionately, a woman's naked bottom is seen in the cartoon sequence, and a woman with an ulterior motive flirts with Venom and calls him sexy. Fairly strong language includes a use of "f--k," plus "s--t," "son of a bitch," "a--hole," "p---y," and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (19)
• Kids say (75)

Based on 19 parent reviews

Not impressed and not disppointed

Nanar movie, what's the story.

In VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE, Eddie Brock ( Tom Hardy ) is still learning how to live as a host to alien symbiote Venom, but his career is going well, even if his former partner, Anne ( Michelle Williams ), has announced that she's going to marry Dr. Dan ( Reid Scott ). Eddie is asked to visit the cell of imprisoned serial killer Cletus Kasady ( Woody Harrelson ). Kasady promises to let Eddie have an exclusive on his life story if he'll print a message that's intended to go to Kasady's true love, Frances Barrison ( Naomie Harris ), who's secretly imprisoned for possession of a deadly super-power. But Venom finds a clue to the location of one of Kasady's victims, which condemns Kasady to execution. During Eddie's final visit to his cell, Kasady bites the reporter and swallows some of his blood, turning him into Carnage, an even bigger and more deadly version of Venom. With both Carnage and Frances on the loose, Eddie must make peace with his other half and save the day.

Is It Any Good?

With poorly chosen "comedy" moments that consist mainly of shouting and action elements that are mainly noise and smashing, this sequel misses every chance to come together in a satisfying way. Directed Andy Serkis , Venom: Let There Be Carnage (which follows 2018's hit Venom ) starts off with a supposedly comic situation, as Eddie and Venom argue and shout about how things are going to be. They're like a more violent, less funny version of Shrek and Donkey . The movie has no idea how to weave the situation of Venom occupying Eddie's body into clever or physical humor. It's all forced and graceless. Unlike, say, Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin in 1984's excellent body-sharing comedy All of Me , every attempt at a similar situation here -- such as Eddie ducking into a women's bathroom to argue with Venom -- falls completely flat.

As Carnage, Harrelson sometimes manages a few wry line-readings, but he also frequently stumbles on his chunky, villainous dialogue, as does Harris. (This is the kind of movie wherein one of Carnage's first lines is "Let's get this party started!") Normally a bold performer, Williams perhaps fares the worst of anyone in the cast; in her one big scene, Anne must use her "feminine wiles" to convince Venom that he's sexy, just before she's kidnapped and held captive for the rest of the movie. The action is a blur, with mounting destruction and no human interest or consequences. It's difficult to care as either buildings crumble or victims are dispatched. On the plus side, the Venom visual effects are quite impressive, and the movie is swiftly paced, which means it's over fairly quickly.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Venom: Let There Be Carnage 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How has Venom changed over the course of the three movies, from Spider-Man 3 and the first Venom to this one? Did you like this version better? Worse? Why?

How do Eddie and Venom demonstrate teamwork ? How does teamwork fit into the rest of the story?

When Detective Mulligan says that secrets are always trying to get out and that's why it's so hard to keep them, what does he mean? Is it good to keep secrets sometimes? Why, or why not?

The villains here begin their rampage by seeking revenge. What's the appeal of revenge? Does it ever solve anything?

Movie Details

• In theaters : October 1, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : December 14, 2021
• Cast : Tom Hardy , Michelle Williams , Woody Harrelson
• Director : Andy Serkis
• Inclusion Information : Middle Eastern/North African directors, Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Sony Pictures Releasing
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Superheroes , Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires , Space and Aliens
• Run time : 90 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : intense sequences of violence and action, some strong language, disturbing material and suggestive references
• Last updated : May 20, 2024

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage Review: Too Much Killer & Not Enough Filler in Brief Sequel

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage suffers from the same split personality that bedevils the lead characters. It's a riotous CGI spectacle with superb action scenes and wicked humor. But the plot is razor thin and basic. It feels like director Andy Serkis is racing to kick you out of the theater. The film whizzes by quickly in ninety minutes. Venom: Let There Be Carnage is the rare case of too much killer and not enough filler.

Life for Eddie Brock ( Tom Hardy ) has taken a downturn. Anne (Michelle Williams) has fully committed to the boorish Dan (Reid Scott). His career as a reporter is in shambles. And he's got an annoying alien symbiote literally chomping at the bit for brains. On the flipside, Venom thinks Eddie's holding them back. It doesn't understand why they can't kill bad guys and munch on their craniums. Eddie views Venom as a curse. While Venom believes it's the best thing that ever happened to a gigantic loser and buzzkill.

Meanwhile on San Quentin prison's death row , maniacal serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) offers Eddie Brock the scoop of a lifetime. Eddie's story does not sit well with the murderer. He also pines away for a lost love (Naomie Harris) with an incredible power and equal thirst for violence. A foolish gamble by Venom gives Kasady access to a new alien symbiote. Which unlocks his evil potential and unleashes Carnage on San Francisco. Eddie and Venom must get over their differences to be the dark hero the city needs.

The bickering between humans, symbiotes, and each other provides a solid flow of laughs. Tom Hardy's pained expressions and outbursts while keeping Venom in check are hilarious. But an opportunity was lost to dig even deeper into their relationship. The film is scant on exposition. This puzzles me because there's a goldmine of possibilities with the symbiotes. Woody Harrelson, in full Natural Born Killers mode, hams up his interaction with Carnage as well. The hero and villain juxtapose each other successfully. There needed to be more of these scenes to add weight to the slight narrative.

Andy Serkis ( The Lord of the Rings , Planet of the Apes franchises) is arguably the greatest motion capture actor in Hollywood. His third turn as a feature film director is oddly not compelling. Serkis nails the blockbuster action with big-budget visual effects. But seemingly treats the plot like a nagging afterthought. I have to believe that the script was more robust. Venom: Let There Be Carnage needs a longer edit. The film has a bare bones quality that's strange and unexpected.

My gut reaction to this sequel boils down to pure entertainment value. Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a superhero popcorn film and can be enjoyed as such. It doesn't have the grand storytelling of recent comic book adaptations. But has enough good bits to make the experience worthwhile. Stick around during the credits. There's a whopper development that'll leave fans stoked. Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a production of Marvel Entertainment, Pascal Pictures, and Columbia Pictures. It will be released exclusively in theaters on October 1st from Sony Pictures.

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• venom 2 (2021)

Venom 2 review: "May leave you feeling undernourished"

GamesRadar+ Verdict

Some entertaining bicker-banter, but you may feel like Venom craving human heads: undernourished and angsty for what could’ve been.

Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.

The mid-credits sting at the end of Venom 2’s 2018 predecessor saw journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) visit serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) in San Quentin prison. “When I escape, there will be carnage,” intoned the caged psycho, whose fright wig was carnage enough, thank you very much. 

And so here we are in 2021 – a year later than planned, courtesy of Covid – with Kasady on the loose and hosting the alien adversary created by writer David Michelinie and artist Mark Bagley in the ’90s Marvel comics .

Plot-wise, you don’t need to know much more, even if more plot did exist – which it doesn’t. Brock/Venom are of course still pining for former love Anne (Michelle Williams), and Kasady likewise suffers from romantic heartache, having been separated years ago from Frances Barrison aka Shriek (Naomie Harris). She’s now residing in a Perspex cube at Ravencroft Institute for the criminally insane, her sonic screams a menace to public and symbiotes alike.

With Venom director Ruben Fleischer making way for Andy Serkis, who knows a thing or two about duality, Venom: Let There Be Carnage clocks in at under 90 minutes, sans credits. The majority of the taut running time is curiously lacking in any major set-pieces, but when one does arrive, at the climax, it’s long and leaden and visually dismal – all crumbling masonry and clashing CG beasties, with tentacles bursting every which way like tendrils of colour erupting from a dropped paint pot. Such is the murk and mess it’s hard to credit this is lensed by three-time Academy Award winner Robert Richardson, a regular of Scorsese and Tarantino.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is better when it focuses on being a relationship drama, with every interaction commented on by its title star. Brock and his parasite make for a fun odd couple, their bickering amplified by Venom’s constant hunger as he tries to subsist not on human brains but chickens and chocolate. There are parallels with the second A Nightmare On Elm Street movie, Freddy’s Revenge (1985), in which Krueger possesses a teenage boy. And like Freddy, Venom is a monstrous slayer armed with killer quips who is destined to become a family favourite – a scene in a club, with Venom lit by glow sticks as he takes to the mic, is his spotlight moment.

Like the critically underrated first film, Serkis’ effort is a pulpy B-movie with a budget. It’s almost Raimi-esque in its treatment of body horror, and has its large, pointy tongue stuffed firmly in its cheek. But it’s just not as sharp, and the action is more smudge than punch. Let’s hope the prospective third instalment gives Brock/Venom the vehicle they deserve. A hugely exciting mid-credits sting ensures even viewers who don’t get on with this movie will be queuing for the next. 

Jamie Graham is the Editor-at-Large of Total Film magazine. You'll likely find them around these parts reviewing the biggest films on the planet and speaking to some of the biggest stars in the business – that's just what Jamie does. Jamie has also written for outlets like SFX and the Sunday Times Culture, and appeared on podcasts exploring the wondrous worlds of occult and horror. 

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Venom 2 early reviews: an absurd & uneven film anchored by tom hardy.

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Early reviews for Venom: Let There Be Carnage are in, and it sounds like the film is an overall improvement over its predecessor. Written by Kelly Marcel and directed by Andy Serkis, Venom 2 stars Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, Woody Harrelson as Cletus Kasady, Michelle Williams as Anne Weying, and Naomie Harris as Francis Barrison / Shriek . Venom: Let There Be Carnage releases in theaters in the U.S. on October 1, 2021.

Because of the comic book character’s immense popularity, the original Venom was highly anticipated. It ended up being a disappointment for many, though it still performed well at the box office and found a substantial fan base for it’s uniquely wacky brand of superhero action. Venom 2 has had even more excitement surrounding it because of the presence of Carnage in his live-action debut. But because of Venom’s shortcomings, many have doubted whether Venom: Let There Be Carnage can truly deliver on its immense potential.

Related:  How Much Venom 2 Cost To Make (& How Much To Be A Box Office Success)

Fortunately, it sounds like  Venom 2 is notably better than the original. Early reviews for the film are in, and they’re a bit mixed but skew positive overall, giving particular praise to the continued Odd Couple  dynamic between Eddie and Venom. Harrelson’s villainous Carnage also seems to be a hit, bringing the murderous villain to the big screen in spectacular form. The movie clearly isn't without it's problems, and its far from a masterpiece, but it sounds like the sheer craziness and bombast may be worth the price of admission. Check out what the critics are saying about Venom: Let There Be Carnage below.

Molly Freeman,  Screen Rant

"Even though the film is an action-packed comic book movie and Eddie and Venom's relationship is still a compelling dynamic, it still has some major issues in its character and story development. Perhaps one day someone will get a Venom movie exactly right and, though today is not that day, Serkis, Marcel and Hardy deliver an entertaining spin on the continued adventures of Eddie Brock and his symbiote."

Amy Nicholson,  The New York Times

"Yes, there are battles — all of them exponentially less interesting than a twitch of Hardy’s eyebrow. “Let There Be Carnage” flourishes in high-energy moments and feeds off low expectations; it’s the mold in the Avengers’ shower. Perhaps the next installment could do away with the pretense of these dingbats needing to save the world? As Venom growls, 'Responsibility is for the mediocre.'"

Leah Greenblatt,  EW

"That happy, heedless embrace of anarchy somehow serves the movie's YOLO sensibility, and even comes to define it in its own way — if we're all disposable space chum in this franchise game anyway, who needs a coherent narrative and character arcs? Just bite the head off every chicken, and lean in."

Peter Debruge,  Variety

"The set-pieces look sloppy, the visual effects are all over the place, and the laughs come largely at the movie’s expense. But it does introduce Carnage, so in that respect, mission accomplished."

Matt Goldberg, Collider

"I suppose if you like your comic book movies to play it a little straighter, then Let There Be Carnage will be frustrating. It’s not a raunchy comedy like Deadpool nor is it a darker superhero picture like Batman. It exists awkwardly in between, but at least by leaning more towards comedy, you get an entertaining albeit instantly forgettable picture where a muscular CGI alien fires off quips."

William Bibbiani,  TheWrap

"'Venom: Let There Be Carnage' is a bold and brisk superhero story, unlike any other mainstream Hollywood film in the genre. It crams a heck of a lot of movie into an hour and a half, but it doesn’t feel like it needed to be longer. It just feels like we need more movies like it."

Kate Erbaldn,  IndieWire

"'Venom: Let There Be Carnage' is at its best — and its most unique, amusing, and fresh — when it’s tossing out those expectations and letting its freak flag fly. There doesn’t need to be carnage (or, hell, even Carnage), there just needs to be Venom, and more of it."

Francesca Rivera,  IGN

"Venom: Let There Be Carnage finally pairs Venom and Eddie with a worthy villain in a story that embraces its weirder side. Andy Serkis directs a fun and action-packed sequel that highlights Venom as his own character and features Woody Harrelson and Naomie Harris as breakout villains with excellent chemistry. Taking itself less seriously and having more fun, its relatively short runtime is packed densely with plenty of action, character development, and campy humor. At the same time, it’s a love story about relationships evolving and learning to grow and trust each other. Venom as a series is working through its growing pains, but it looks like it’s uphill from here."

By all accounts, Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a pretty messy and uneven movie. The story has been described as confusing by some critics, and the emotional stakes seem to be hit or miss. But the core of the film – the bizarre, hilarious relationship between Eddie and Venom, and now between Cletus and Carnage as well – still seems to deliver enough sheer entertainment value to justify a ticket for anyone who loved the original, or who wants to give the lead character another shot.

The ending of Venom: Let There Be Carnage is getting special mention in reviews for the interesting ways it sets up the future of the franchise, and it seems like that may be the film’s greatest strength – that it improves on Venom and lays a path for continued improvement going forward. Hardy is still the star of the show, and he’s earned high praise across the board in early reviews. If he’s willing to return to the role once more, the Venom franchise might finally yield the movie fans have always hoped for. Even without that, though, Venom: Let There Be Carnage seems like a marked improvement over the original and an entertaining ride despite its flaws.

Next:  Why Venom Should Lead A Movie Team Of Antiheroes (Like The Suicide Squad)

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage

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• Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage Review: Why It's Watchable (Review)

History will look back on 2021 as a significant year for comic book movie fandom. Between the big and small screen, fans have been treated to  Zack Snyder's Justice League,  a  Black Widow  movie, and a new golden era for superheroes on television following a record-dry 2020 due to pandemic-caused delays.

To add to the showering of riches fans have enjoyed this year, they have also been given the symbiotic sequel everyone has been waiting for.  Venom: Let There Be Carnage  is here, and the  Sony Spider-Man Universe will never be the same. 

With quotes coming from Hardy and Serkis about Peter Parker and marketing re-coining the phrase  "expanding the universe,"   Venom: Let There Be Carnage  quickly became about what's next just as much as about what happens in this movie. The early reactions doubled down on this narrative when they mainly focused on the post-credit scene being an Earth-shattering event. 

Factors like runtime , initial reviews, and the non-focused marketing campaign had expectations for this movie lower than most in 2021. But the anticipation for what this movie could mean for the greater Sony Spider-Man Universe is sky-high. 

Venom: Let There Be Carnage  is an important piece to a puzzle much larger than itself. How did it go?

Venom & Carnage's Romantic Comedy

The simple fact about this sequel is that if you enjoyed the first one, there is a high likelihood you will enjoy this one. Director Andy Serkis and his team looked at the elements that they felt propelled  Venom  to box office success and put all of their chips on those numbers. The buddy cop dynamic between Eddie Brock and Venom is the core of the movie with the B plot sprinkled around it. 

This leaves little room for the rest of the story to develop around our dual main characters. "Fast-paced" was a common tag given in early reviews, and if anything, that is an understatement. Elements like Cletus Kasady (Carnage) and Frances Barrison (Shriek) were halfway down the field moments after being introduced. Fans will get little to no time to get to know these new characters, but that is not why they paid money for the ticket. 

The admiration this movie will receive will be majority reliant on the aesthetic and feel of the symbiote characters. The way Venom and Carnage move and interact with each other and the rest of the world is about as elite as monsters on-screen get. Add in some incredible sound design and exciting fight choreography, and this movie is a treat for the eyes anytime Venom and Carnage are on the screen. 

Tom Hardy is Eddie Brock & Venom

The people making decisions at Sony Pictures are the biggest Eddie/Venom fans of all time. Tom Hardy brings back his eccentric and unique take on the estranged journalist and turns it up to 11. Now, with an entire 90-something minutes of Venom to play off of, this duo is the foundation for everything happening in this movie.

The execution of this dynamic is where the movie asks audiences to suspend disbelief. This is a movie about an alien lifeform taking over a person's body to get into all kinds of wacky adventures. Even so, the communication between these two characters resulted in a heavy dose of Tom Hardy talking to himself. This is a staple of the Venom character that may be destined for a flat presentation on the big screen. 

If you liked the Eddie/Venom dynamic in the first one, this sequel may be perfect for you. It feels like no one was asked to change anything between these two characters but only to do more of what was done in  Venom.  Lacking some character development relevant to screen time, these two provide what charm this movie has to offer and will be something fans can grab on to throughout the film. 

Woody Harrelson Is Cletus Kasady & Carnage

Like the majority of movies in the world,  Venom: Let There Be Carnage  is a love story. At the center is the sociopathic murderer and all-around bad dude Cletus Kasady, played by the legendary Woody Harrelson. Kasady is the reason for the season as he invites Eddie Brock to do a story on him and tell his story. When Brock doesn't paint Kasady in a bright light and uncovers a few of his biggest cold cases, Kasady sets out a personal vendetta to bring down Eddie Brock. 

While the look and feel of Carnage is everything comic book fans have ever dreamed of, one layer deeper is a character who has a serious lack of motivation. The Cletus Kasady character lives in short spurts of moments throughout the movie that gets him and Carnage from A to B with exciting battle and destructive action scenes along the way. What is missing is any real explanation as to why Cletus has it out for Eddie Brock and why these characters are connected in any way. The ambiguity of this relationship comes off as jarring.  

The problems with the human version of this two-part baddie also carry over to the symbiotic version, Carnage. Carnage enters the game and immediately starts making huge destructive plays over and over. Watching Carnage wreak havoc on everything and everyone in his path is the highlight of this movie. The VFX team responsible for these creatures should be proud of their work. Unfortunately, it was overshadowed by character development that was glossed over, at best. 

In the panels of the comics, Carnage and Venom have a complicated, dark, and interesting father/son relationship that pits the two against each other at every turn. In  Let There Be Carnage , this was handled with throw-away lines of dialogue in the middle of a few of the many exposition-heavy quick-cut scenes. This leaves little room for the audiences to connect with Carnage on a level past looking scary. 

Director Andy Serkis seemed to have found the charming attributes of  Venom  and leaned into them in the sequel. Unfortunately, he also seemed to have brought one of the biggest critiques of introducing major story points with uninspired writing. In  Venom , the bonding factor of Venom being a loser, just like Eddie Brock, is brushed over in a walk and talk that seemed less than vital. The same is done here with both Kasady and Carnage's motivation to go after their respective foils. 

Harrelson does his best to bring a sadistic and creepy passion to this character but is left behind by writing that seemed too scared to be Rated R.

An eccentric and misunderstood villain has a great opportunity to shine in a role like this, but it gets more difficult when the quirkiness falls on the title character. 

The Supporting Cast of Let There Be Carnage

The motivation that Cletus did make clear was his love for his old St. Estes girlfriend, Frances Barrison. Shriek's sole purpose is to be the two to Cletus Kasady's one. With the powers of supersonic screeching, Shriek plays the henchman role for Kasady and becomes the brief crux of the disagreement between him and Carnage. She opens the movie only to be a supplementary piece to the overall plot. The character was saved by the authentically crooked smile Naomi Harris brings to the role. 

Stephen Graham is the third and final new character to play the part of Detective Mulligan. With a thin-threaded connection to Shriek, Mulligan is unknowingly a piece to the puzzle he is trying to solve. He and Eddie Brock have an agreement to avenge the victims of Cletus Kasady, but the two do not see eye-to-eye in the process. Mulligan has an interesting balance between the accessory piece and sneaky importance throughout the movie. 

To round out the supporting cast is the return of everyone's favorite Venomverse couple, Anne and Dan. Michaell Willaims and Reid Scott return to be the awkward tag-team partners of the ever-failing Eddie Brock. Early in the movie, Anne is the crux of tension between Eddie and Venom.

The Story and Plot

Something that this movie seems to do that gives it a charming edge over its predecessor is that it is delightfully aware of its role in the comic book movie landscape. This is not going to be the emotional character study that fans can see themselves in, and it is not going to be an elaborate plot with exciting twists, turns, and surprises. This is, more than anything else, a reason for two iconic comic book characters to get isolated time to be adapted to the big screen. 

As laid out in the character breakdowns above, this movie does not give audiences a great deal of time to get to know and care about these characters. But that does leave more room for the whimsical banter between the title character(s). Fast-paced is tough for character development but great for getting to the next action scene. The final battle in this movie throws the plot aside for a few minutes to focus on the beautiful display of alien combat.

Something is endearing about a movie that knows what it is trying to be. While the plot misses a few opportunities to take advantage of its characters, it does shine a light on what the general audience loves about this franchise. That gives a redeemable floor for this movie as opposed to trying to be something it is not. 

Venom Visual Victory

Advice that is sometimes given for movies with lackluster stories is to not think so hard about the plot and focus on the fun stuff.

Well, if fans aren't caught up in the whys and hows of these characters, they are in for effects as good as they have ever seen. Animating and designing these monsters to move and feel unique and creative is one of the tallest tasks these movies provide. This team put an incredible effort toward that task, and it pays off with top-tier visual effects. 

Along with the incredible aesthetic of this movie, the auditory experience is another highlight of the movie. Carnage specifically had a scream that was both unique and scary. This does a ton of heavy lifting in painting Carnage in the intimidating light he was meant to be painted in. Along with the visceral SFX brought over from  Venom  in 2018, this movie gets the popcorn tag as an audio/visual experience that warrants the movie theater setting. 

THAT Post Credit Scene

The early reactions set the bar about as high as it could go  with the post-credits scene being the focus of many early reviews.

This end-credits stinger sets the stage for the future of the character and adjusts the trajectory of the Sony Spider-Man Movie Universe franchise.  

Final Thoughts On Venom: Let There Be Carnage

The post-credits scene will be the first, second, and third talking point coming out of  Venom: Let There Be Carnage,  which could warrant the story receiving the label of "forgettable." Despite some amazing VFX work, a charming sense of presence that was lacking in the first installment, and some great visual representation of classic comic book characters, this movie leaves a lot to be desired due to its messy narrative.

There is a version of billiards called 8-Ball that forces players to hit the balls in numerical order until the last eight ball has been sunk. The players alternate shots when a ball is not put in a pocket and whichever player sinks the eight ball wins, despite the result of 1-7. This game is famous for the common luck behind being able to miss every shot, sink the last ball, and win the game. 

Venom: Let There Be Carnage  had a shaky performance for the first seven balls but was able to get lucky and sink the eight ball with a big action scene and a post-credit hall of famer. 

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Venom: Let There Be Carnage’ on Starz, an Epically Moronic Marvel Sequel That’ll Eat Your Grey Matter Alive

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• Venom: Let There Be Carnage

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Now on Starz after landing in theaters in late 2021, Venom: Let There Be Carnage picks up right where Venom left off: Moronville. The first film was one of 2018’s most annoying movies, a Spider-Man spinoff — sans Spider-Man! Pretty sweet — starring a ludicrously overqualified Tom Hardy as the webslinger’s most powerful enemy, an alien goo-blob who can merge with a human and become a massive humanoid megatoothed shapeshifting wisecracking asshole. It also featured an end-credits teaser sequence in which Woody Harrelson appears as a character who will become Carnage, who’s pretty much exactly like Venom except he’s red. And lo, the prophecy of Black Venom vs. Red Venom is fulfilled, as the gods ordained from high above, perched on their towering piles of money.

VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: THE FIRST OF MANY OMINOUS SUBTITLES: Oh god, why bother. It’s a comic-book nuthouse where young Cletus Kasady is locked up for killing his family. Alongside him is a woman named Frances Barrison who can scream holy hell, a mutant power of some never-explained — again, why bother — sort. They’re split up and, well, again, broken record here, why bother getting into detail, because it doesn’t matter in the slightest. There’s another ominous subtitle telling us it’s the present day, but it’s another comic-book nuthouse, not the same as the first one, but who can tell? Frances (Naomie Harris) is there. Now we jump to San Quentin, where intrepid, and always a little greasy-looking and bedheaded, reporter Eddie Brock-slash-Venom (Hardy, playing both, lending a distorted voice to the latter character) interviews Cletus (Harrelson), hoping to shake some information out of him about the bodies of the people he serially killed. Meanwhile, Venom exists inside Eddie’s head the whole time, chattering away like the DVD commentary of the damned, occasionally manifesting as a smear of tar-black CGI with a couple of evil teardrop eyes, usually, and quite thoughtfully, when nobody’s looking.

At this point I struggle to recall the Eddie-Venom dynamic as established in the first movie, which deserves to be abolished to the nethers of lost memory. I think they’re benevolent vigilantes now, except Venom still demands to consume human brains, because that kind of shit is funny if you’re 11. He has to settle for chickens, which is the Venom equivalent of vampires hitting up the butcher shop for a carton of pig plasma — but that’s hard, because he’s grown attached to two of the fowl, which he’s named Sonny and Cher, a joke that’s aimed at 11-year-olds but is only funny if you’re a lot older than that, although most people who are a lot older than that won’t laugh. Anyhow, Eddie appears to be somewhat reasonably managing the issue of sharing a brain with an alien slobberbeast that sometimes makes a gigantic mess of the kitchen while preparing breakfast, like a real Oscar to Eddie’s Felix, a reference that only people who are a lot lot older than 11 will snatch from the air like Miyagi’s chopsticks to a fly.

Venom and Eddie agree on one thing: They still have a big thing for Eddie’s ex, Anne (Michelle Williams, reprising the paycheck from the first movie). What kind of thing Venom has is as yet unknown; is he anatomically correct? If so, do they share the thing, and all the things it does? The mind boggles, until it irreparably breaks. Anne has a new fiancee now, prompting Venom to tell Eddie, “Emotional pain — it hits much harder and lasts much longer. You just need to pull up your big boy pants and take it.” Neat! She also inevitably becomes a damsel in distress when Cletus becomes Carnage, the crimson Venom, although of course Cletus-Carnage comes a-callin’ right after Eddie and Venom split up, literally, thus invoking the universal distress we all feel when our alien symbiotes vamoose with nary a lick of couples counseling even, and leaves us vulnerable to slavering serial killers-turned-hideous-monsters. Say it with me: I HATE WHEN THAT HAPPENS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Venom films are like the Deadpool s crossed with one of the medium-terrible Fantastic Four s.

Performance Worth Watching: (Mumbles incoherently, something about Tom Hardy)

Memorable Dialogue: Eddie points out the inappropriateness of Venom’s actions, and also inadvertently reviews his own movie: “That was abusive.”

Sex and Skin: None. The mystery of Venom’s reproductive capabilities remains just that.

Our Take: The opening credits appear and, 35,000 FX shots later, ya got yerself a movie ! Venom: Let There Be Carnage marks a directorial change from its predecessor, from Ruben Fleischer to Andy Serkis, and if you can tell the visionary differences in each film’s unconvincing CGI omnibewilderment, congratulations, you are a movie knower like few ever have been. Maybe the sequel leans a hair more towards comedy than Venom , but it absolutely matches the first film’s obnoxiousness. The most discernible difference between the two rewards those who can count by ones: Carnage is 14 minutes shorter, and is therefore the more merciful film.

By the time we get a good gawk at Harrelson’s ridiculous Frankenstein haircut-wig; by the time Carnage kills a prison warden by inexplicably turning himself into a tornado; by the time Venom briefly divorces himself from Eddie, meanders into an LGBTQ rave and yell-growls “Look at all these weirdos. My kind of people!”, this movie has reached a ripe level of juvenile annoyance, of pervasive peabrainedness, of “comedy” in the fullest sense of the quote marks, that you just want to flick it away like a mosquito. And like the bug to your blood, the movie feels like it’s gorging on your intelligence, quaffing the IQ points until you’re a husk, your smooth muscle pumping blood to a brain no longer capable of anything more than basic, unconscious function.

V: LTBC is the type of movie with a big final grand kerflooey of mass destruction, its two endlessly morphing tentacular creatures flying toward each other, engaging in mid-air lunge-punches over and over again until we care about absolutely nothing that happens, in the movie or perhaps in the entirety of existence. None of the film makes sense, or maybe it’s just not worth the effort to make sense of it; is there a difference? It’s overstimulation to the point of ultraboredom. It’s the visual equivalent of a sheet of noise, and the one-liner-laden dialogue is just a louder, more grating sheet on top of the first sheet. So, yes, this movie sure is a whole lot of sheet.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a disconcerting experience.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com .

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• Cast & crew

Venom: The Last Dance

Eddie and Venom are on the run. Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddi... Read all Eddie and Venom are on the run. Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie's last dance. Eddie and Venom are on the run. Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie's last dance.

• Kelly Marcel
• Juno Temple
• Alanna Ubach
• 2 Critic reviews

• Eddie Brock …

• Detective Mulligan

• Donald The Security Guard
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia Tom Holland said he and Amy Pascal had discussed him potentially reprising his role as Spider-Man in future Venom sequels.

Venom : Eddie... my home has found us.

• Connections Follows Venom (2018)
• When will Venom: The Last Dance be released? Powered by Alexa
• October 25, 2024 (United States)
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• United Kingdom
• Official Website
• Venom: Kèo Cuối
• Cartagena, Spain
• Columbia Pictures
• Arad Productions
• Hutch Parker Entertainment
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• Dolby Atmos
• IMAX 6-Track

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Deadpool, Spider-Man and More Join Marvel's Venom War

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Marvel's Venom War event is gearing up to see more heroes joining the battle this September in a variety of new miniseries. Deadpool, Daredevil and more will all be a part of tie-ins for the epic new symbiote event.

Al Ewing and Iban Coello's Venom War will kick off this August, and Marvel has now revealed a glimpse of battles to come in September's issues. The newly revealed covers show the far-reaching extent of Ewing's Venom War on the Marvel Universe, which will include a variety of all-new limited series starring Deadpool, Daredevil, Spider-Man, Wolverine and more. Marvel's heroic characters -- including the Symbiote Black Widow -- will jump into action against a horde of zombie symbiotes (Zombiotes) unleashed upon New York City as the story unfolds.

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VENOM WAR #2 (OF 5)

• Written by AL EWING
• Art and Cover by IBAN COELLO
• On Sale Sept. 4

VENOM WAR: SPIDER-MAN #2 (OF 4)

• Written by COLLIN KELLY & JACKSON LANZING
• Art and Cover by GREG LAND

• Written by TORUNN GRØNBEKK
• Art and Cover by CAFU
• On Sale Sept. 11

VENOM WAR: WOLVERINE #1 (OF 3)

• Written by TIM SEELEY & TONY FLEECS
• Art by KEV WALKER
• Cover by KEN LASHLEY

VENOM WAR: CARNAGE #2 (OF 3)

• Art by PERE PÉREZ

VENOM WAR: DEADPOOL #1 (OF 3)

• Written by CULLEN BUNN
• Art by ROB DI SALVO
• Cover by GIUSEPPE CAMUNCOLI
• On Sale Sept. 18

VENOM WAR: LETHAL PROTECTORS #1 (OF 3)

• Written by SABIR PIRZADA
• Art by LUCA MARESCA
• Cover by CREEES LEE

VENOM WAR: VENOMOUS #2 (OF 3)

• Written by ERICA SCHULTZ
• Art by LUCIANO VECCHIO
• Cover by LEIRIX

VENOM WAR: DAREDEVIL #1

• Written by CHRIS CONDON
• Art by LAN MEDINA
• COVER BY JAVI FERNÁNDEZ
• On Sale Sept. 25

VENOM WAR: ZOMBIOTES #2 (OF 3)

• Written by CAVAN SCOTT
• Art by JUAN JOSÉ RYP
• Cover by JUAN FERREYRA

The second issue of Ewing's Venom War five-part series sees The Amazing Spider-Man enter the ring in the battle to determine the "one true Venom". Meanwhile, the villainous Meridius plots his endgame, unleashing more half-zombie half-symbiotes upon New York City, threatening to turn heroes, villains and innocent people into his servants.

Venom War Tie-Ins Include Marvel's Most Iconic Heroes

New Venom War tie-ins launching in September include Venom War: Deadpool , which sees the Merc with a Mouth facing the Zombiotes in a story by Cullen Bunn. Venom War: Daredevil sees Manhattan under siege from the Zombiotes as the two Daredevils try to keep them at bay.

EXCLUSIVE: Spider-Men: Peter and Miles Face Off Against a New Villainous A.I. Threat

In an exclusive reveal at Spectacular Spider-Men's September solicitation, CBR reveals the new villain Peter and Miles must face in the upcoming issue

Venom War: Lethal Protectors tells the story of Silver Sable and the Symbiote Squad as the mercenaries unleash the Life Foundation Symbiotes against the bloodthirsty zombies. Venom War: Wolverine sees the mighty mutant bonding with a Zombiote himself in a horror story by writers Tim Seeley and Tony Fleecs.

The Venom War event kicks off in August from Marvel Comics.

Source: Marvel