The Doctor’s Diagnosis: F
Venom: Let There Be Carnage is one of the worst comic book movies ever made and I think I’ve seen every one of them. I hated every second of this film. I hated every second of the experience of watching this film, and I’ll review the audience at the end. This is a misfire on the level of Catwoman or Green Lantern or Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. This is the kind of movie that makes me reconsider what I do in my spare time and makes me worried about the direction of humanity as a species. This wasn’t so much a filmgoing experience for me as it was a 90-minute existential crisis that made me wonder if I have a place in this world anymore.
I hated the original Venom and the sequel doubles down on everything that was wrong with it. Venom shouldn’t be a good guy. The original made him a good guy in an act of sheer laziness, as it’s harder to write a film centered around a villain than it is to just make a generic, cliché-riddled superhero story. A film about Venom shouldn’t be a comedy and I honestly never thought that I would need to point out such a thing. That’s like pointing out that Joker shouldn’t be the main character in a Hallmark Christmas movie. I don’t know how I now live in a world where these things aren’t self-evident and it frightens me.
And yet here we are. Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a godawful buddy comedy, and that’s another sentence that I never thought that I would write. Venom is played purely for laughs despite the fact that there aren’t any actual jokes. There is absolutely no menace to him, he is purely the wacky half of the cliché odd couple buddy team. He’s the Balki Bartokomous to Tom Hardy’s Larry Appleton, if you will (I’m getting old, so you kids may need to Google that one). The fact that Venom wants to eat people is just played as a running gag and Venom shouldn’t be a fucking joke. The film even trots out a third-act breakup between Eddie and Venom as if this was a fucking romantic comedy and the writers wanted to make sure they crammed in every sitcom and buddy comedy cliché that they could possibly think of. This film is a paradox in that its aggressively lazy, like the filmmakers balled up a fist of clichés and shoved it up my ass.
As much as I disliked the original, the final scene’s introduction of Carnage and the casting of Woody Harrelson gave me hope for the sequel. The final result makes me think that I should write off childish things like hope. In the comics, Carnage is a vicious serial killer with absolutely no redeeming, or even human, qualities. Here, the serial killer angle is downplayed and instead Carnage is presented as a disturbed consequence of an abusive childhood, another cliché that made me wonder if Rob Zombie co-wrote the film. I wondered how a film with Carnage could possibly be rated PG-13, and it turns out that it can be done by completely neutering the character. For fuck’s sake, his entire goal is to break his childhood girlfriend out of an asylum, a goal that couldn’t be further from the pure homicidal madness of the character. It would be like if Freddy Krueger took a break from slaughtering teenagers to go on a mission find his high school sweetheart. One would think that Woody Harrelson, a man that can make almost anything watchable, would at least make things entertaining, but this movie actually makes Woody Harrelson playing a psychopath boring. That’s hard to do. He often looks bored or as if he’s waiting for some direction to do something, anything, to bring some life to the film. That direction never came.
Speaking of the PG-13 rating, this is closer to a PG than it is an R. Considering the title, there is shockingly little carnage in the film. Venom is just as kid-friendly as he was in the first movie and Carnage is the least violent serial killer in the history of cinema. There is one scene (a prison break sequence) where we are given a half-assed approximation of the kind of killing sprees that he goes on in the comics, but, through a combination of intentionally shitty editing and unintentionally shitty effects, even this rampage is stripped any actual on-screen bloodshed. I guess you do need to remove all that pesky violence so that kids can get into the theater and the film can make big bucks at the box office. It’s not like the R-rated Joker made over a billion fucking dollars or anything.
I would have hated this film enough, but the audience in my theater made me truly despise it. My theater was completely packed; I got the last two tickets together that weren’t in the front row. There was me, my friend and one random dude sitting next to us and we were having none of this (that random guy should probably be a friend of mine). The rest of that theater can fuck themselves. No matter what happened in the film, including moments when nothing in particular was happening, the theater would erupt in laughter and applause every couple of minutes for no fucking reason. I wanted to ram my ICEE cup down the throat of the guy to my left because he would literally clap and laugh every 30 seconds like he was on a timer. If there was an establishing shot of a building, this dickhead would laugh like he was watching Airplane! for the first time. Folks, this is why we can’t have nice things. If you put a Marvel and/or Disney product in front of people, regardless of the quality of the film, they will applaud and laugh like trained seals. These companies don’t need to make good films anymore. There is no need for the effort because people will just applaud brand names and intellectual properties. This wasn’t so much a trip to the theater as it was a sad, depressing experiment in consumer groupthink.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venom%3A_Let_There_Be_Carnage#/media/File:Venom_Let_There_Be_Carnage_poster.jpg
