Thursday, September 30, 2021
Venom: Let There Be Carnage
Living in a single room occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin district in San Francisco, the journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) exchanges insults with Venom, the alien hiding in Eddie's body most of the time, and argues like two kids on a school playground. Venom wants to be fed on humans, and Eddie manages to keep Venom on a diet of chickens and chocolate, which is why Eddie raises two chickens in his room (really?) on a journalist's income. Venom has an opinion in just about everything, and even laughs at Eddie when his ex-girlfriend Anne Weying (Michelle Williams) is engaged with someone else.
Eddie is writing about a killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) who is sentenced to death. Cletus's mutant girlfriend Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris) who has an ability to voice super loud sound waves, is locked up in a maximum security psychiatric ward. During an Eddie's visit to Cletus, Venom loses control and Cletus is able to get a drop of blood which unleashes Carnage, Cletus's evil counterpart to Eddie's Venom, in red color instead of black.
With the superpower of Carnage, Cletus goes on a joyride and takes his revenge after rescuing his girlfriend. A messy battle between Venom and Carnage breaks loose in and out of the Grace Cathedral. You don't need to think hard to guess who will win in the end.
Even though Venom and Carnage both look disgusting, the film tries to make Venom sound cute and funny, and it sometimes succeeds in giving Venom a likable personality. That's not easy to do given Venom's appearance. Both Tom Hardy and Woody Harrelson are fairly good when they are not in the forms of an alien. Once they are transformed into an alien, everything is lost in the noise and the violence.
The film could have explained a bit more about Venom and Carnage. Instead, we are only told that they are sensitive to sound. We also see that bullets don't seem to have any impact on them, but we don't know how they are able to over-power each another. Even the filmmakers don't seem to know. They just let the two creatures smash the hell out of each other and destroy the grand Grace Cathedral, among other things. They also seem to have trouble finding a proper ending to the story, so they just abruptly end the movie, like a kid failing to spend the time to complete the homework.
Coming out of the movie theater and passing the Grace Cathedral, it's nice to see it is standing there just fine after the two monsters smashed it into pieces moments ago.
"Venom: Let There Be Carnage" opens on Friday, October 1, 2021.
