Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

 

In 1996, a young Cletus Kasady watches helplessly as his lover, Frances Barrison, is taken away to the Ravencroft Institute, where she is imprisoned and subjected to cruelly experiments because of her sonic scream powers.

Some twenty-five years later, Kasady is a serial killer on death row.  Though facing imminent execution, he has refused to reveal the location of his victims' bodies.  However, he does agree to provide an interview to TV reported Eddie Brock, who he seems to think will treat his story sympathetically.

Brock is secretly the reluctant host of the super-powered alien symbiote Venom.   This makes him much stronger and tougher than any normal human, as well as some shapeshifting capabilities.  On the other hand, it also drives him up the wall because Venom keeps wanting to eat people, and is generally unpleasant.

As you may well have guessed, Brock's interactions with Kasady lead to the serial killer gaining similar powers.  Kasady promptly escapes his execution, rescues Frances from Ravencroft, and goes on a super-powered rampage that only Brock/Venom can stop.  Assuming they can get along with each other long enough to do so.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a superhero action comedy that is so lightweight it is almost lacking in substance.  It introduces a few new concepts to the franchise, but then largely fails to develop any of them and instead continues to rely very heavily on the first film's successful schtick of Tom Hardy mugging at himself as he portrays the odd couple relationship between Brock and Venom.

The whole film feels a bit under-developed.  While I appreciated the relatively brief run time as a nice change of pace from the seemingly ever-longer Marvel movies, that brevity seems to come mostly from a lack of proper developments.  It feels to me like film with only two acts: first lots of set-up, and then suddenly a final battle, without much middle to speak of. Eddie and Venom's little spats aren't really enough to sustain the film until the final showdown with Kasady/Carnage.

The resolution of said final showdown also hinges on a plot development that is simultaneously both very obvious and entirely unconvincing.  Which is a pretty impressive bit of bungling.  "It was entirely obvious from about ten minutes in that this would happen, and yet you have managed to make it feel completely unjustified".

Let There Be Carnage is inoffensive but thoroughly bland, the cinematic equivalent of a single slice of plain white supermarket bread.