Spoiler Free
The original Venom film from 2018 was by no means a great film. However, it got a lot of points for being genuinely funny and for having a really strong portrayal of the main character from Tom Hardy. I had high hopes for the sequel, thinking that they might be able to improve on the formula with Woody Harrelson playing Venom’s arch-nemesis, Carnage, as the first film had a pretty forgettable villain. Woody Harrelson is a good actor, and seemed like a good fit for the character, who I was excited to see finally put to the big screen.
Unfortunately, this film falls far short of the original (which, again, wasn’t a masterpiece). The dynamic between Eddie and the Venom symbiote doesn’t have the charm it once did, as it hits a lot of predictable beats (namely, the main pair struggling to work together for the sequel). The plot is paper-thin (it basically boils down to Venom trying to find Carnage to kill him, and Carnage trying to find Venom so he can kill him), but a good share of the blame for this movie’s failing lies with the villains.
Woody Harrelson starts out seeming like a good villain, as he captures a lot of the appropriate personality traits of Carnage, but things take a turn for the worse once he teams up with Naomi Harris’s Shriek. Admittedly, these characters had no subtlety in the comics and that played into their appeal as they were both just pure evil. While they had a limited life-span, it worked well for the first few comics they were in. Here, they’re so over-the-top that almost everything they say feels painful. Virtually every line Shriek has is trying to be both edgy and poetic which makes for an unbearable combination. It also doesn’t fit with their characters in the comics, who never took themselves seriously and just went on murderous rampages because they thought it was fun. Here, their twisted romance feels so cliched that their characters somehow even have less subtlety. It also makes for a blatant rip-off of the film Natural Born Killers (made even more obvious that the male killer in both of these films was played by Woody Harrelson), only these characters have even less charisma than the ones in Natural Born Killers.
The Marvel super-fans like me will see this regardless of any recommendation I give it (I saw it mostly just to see Carnage finally on the big screen and for the post credits scene, but I still went opening weekend), but for anyone else, it’s not worth the money or even the time spent on a 90-minute movie.
Recommendation: Don’t Watch
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