Flop of horrors
Who knew a symbiotic, brain-eating alien could be so boring?
SITTING at “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” you quietly ask yourself, “What have I done wrong? Is God punishing me?” He is. And your sins must have risen to Old Testament levels because the retribution is harsh. “Venom” is, by far, the worst comic book movie franchise out there — the black sheep, er blob, of Marvel and not even a part of the popular Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Watching it, unless you’re already a demented die-hard fan, is utter agony.
Venom, for the blissfully uninitiated, is a symbiotic alien who’s latched onto the body of San Francisco newspaper columnist/schlub Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and eats human brains to stay alive. Indeed, this sequel chewed up my brain, spit it out and mercilessly stomped on it.
Look at some of this stupid extraterrestrial sludge’s lines: “Whatad––k!” “I need to be free, feeling the wind in my hair and the sun on my toes.”
In Kelly Marcel’s nonsensical script, Venom cracks jokes about Barry Manilow.
All of these cheap grabs at humor are an attempt to cement Eddie and Venom as a silly, bickering “Odd Couple” instead of allowing the plot to go anywhere interesting.
Eddie wants Venom to chow on chicken noggins instead of killing people; Venom begs to kill people.
Eddie is impossibly serious in that way only grimacing Hardy can project, and Venom — in full alien form — takes the stage at a nightclub and gives a speech about how wonderful freedom is. By the end, none of this awkward shuffling matters.
In the comic books, Venom is a villain and nemesis of Spider-Man (he is sorely missed). In the movies, Venom — who speaks like Mufasa from “The Lion King” — battles other baddies who kill for less savory reasons.
This time, that’s Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson), a murderer who’s about to be executed for killing his mom and grandmother when he was a kid. After becoming infected with some of Venom’s DNA, the death row inmate is overtaken by his own red alien host, called Carnage.
The supercharged killer then goes on a rampage to rescue his old girlfriend Shriek (Naomie Harris) — a mutant who can destroy you with her piercing scream — from the cruel institution where she’s locked up.
As for Eddie’s love interest, she’s still played by Michelle Williams, who appears to be sleepwalking.
Meanwhile, the action sequences are bland because nobody has any notable fighting skills. Venom is only good at eating heads and Eddie is not an athlete by any stretch. So every skirmish is an oily monster throwing some dude against a brick wall. After the exhilarating combat of Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” “Let There Be Carnage” looks like a poor cousin, indeed.
And it all adds up to nada. The events of the sequel come across as insignificant because the characters’ lives don’t change much over the course of the movie. It connects to nothing grander. Like a 1970s sitcom, you figure the third film — God forbid — will start over as though nothing happened.
I wish “Venom” had never happened.