![]() And they’ve got pets! Sonny and Cher, a pair of chickens that Venom considers to be his friends. There’s a tire swinging from the ceiling for Venom to, I guess, nibble on - he’s prone to cabin fever - and chocolate wrappers everywhere, and holes in the ceiling, and Brock’s work detritus everywhere. Pour one out for Eddie Brock’s apartment, which by the time of this movie has been Venom-proofed, as in, reduced to the appropriate state of disarray. I’m just here for the good-natured shambliness of it all. That accounts for the central conflict, but not the central pleasure, which remains the humor of Venom (voiced by Hardy) doubling as Brock’s hater-ific inner voice - that part of himself that knows he’s a loser, calls him a loser, and undercuts his self-confidence, while also being the aspect of his personality about which he can be most confident. ![]() Things happen, tempers get lost, and one symbiotic splash later a villain named Carnage, the Venom counterpoint to match Cletus’ psycho-killer self, is accidentally born. He’s spared himself the moral philosophy hang-ups of whether it’s OK to eat the heads of bad guys just because they’re bad guys he just wants to eat heads he needs Eddie to let him off the leash. Plus there’s Venom’s whole head-eating deal: He needs to do it to survive. Restless, hungry, twined to a complete loser whose ex-fiancee Anne (Michelle Williams) is sorely missed by Brock and Venom, both. It is obviously a bad idea to let Brock, and by extension Venom, anywhere near Cletus Kasady. Shriek, a sobriquet that speaks for itself. Cletus, too, has his motivations, much of them tied up in the fate of a young woman he met back in a boarding school for the criminally depraved, Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris), a.k.a. Mulligan’s not selfless he sees this as an opportunity to get some final details out of Cletus, some last insights into where the bodies might be buried. Mulligan gives Brock access to the story of the century: a final interview with the serial killer Cletus Kasady ( Woody Harrelson). We are once again treated to an excuse to hang out with Eddie Brock (Hardy), who is back in the saddle, positioned to repair his reputation as a star journalist, this time thanks to a cop named Mulligan (Stephen Graham, so memorable as an upstart gangster in The Irishman ). But this is still the cozy, goofy universe Hardy and gang carved out for us last time, with the benefit of Serkis making it altogether more lean - the main setup has already been accounted for not much has changed - and doubling down on the man-baby theatrics that made Venom so disarmingly funny. A few of its forays into strangeness outstay their welcome you can feel the movie trying harder than the original had to to prove its bullshit-artistry bona fides. The spontaneous pleasures of the first movie are a little less fresh the second time around. It’s not as good as it was the last time. But the fact that someone allowed that string of words following the colon to make the final cut, and slapped it onto every poster, shipped it out to every theater in the country, and just let it be corny - without needing to perform that hands-off distancing of self-parody - is at least one sign that this sequel, directed by Andy Serkis, is taking a page from its predecessor’s leaf, leaning into everything bad that was actually good, and making good on it. Nor is the new sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Venom isn’t any less of a product than any other superhero movie. An actual B-movie, hardly as brainless as it seemed to be but oh-so-very willing and able to seem to be, a piece of throwaway fun that I refuse to throw away. ![]() The movie was and remains gloriously silly, and brash, and just the right amount of shoddy, with none of the odd energies ricocheting from scene to scene getting smoothed over in favor of the overly professional, overly world-built, vacuum-sealed, product-tested perfection of many of its peers. Here’s a story about a has-been loser journalist and his alarmingly emotionally-codependent alien-symbiote inner self, starring Tom Hardy doing an enthrallingly indecisive Bobcat Goldthwaite impression for an entire movie with a rickety plot involving a big-tech bad guy (Riz Ahmed) whose whole character profile is a list of Short Guy Energy stereotypes CGI, pacing, and writing that seemed maddeningly unpolished, at times to the point of making you wonder if the studio actually watched the movie and a titular weirdo antihero-alien whose brazen tongue-flicking should probably have attracted more MPAA scrutiny. The movie had an admirable target - and even better aim. One of the best things about Venom (2018) is that it so often flew over the heads of people who fashion themselves smart. ![]()
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