geezer cinema: venom: let there be carnage (andy serkis, 2021)
Wednesday, March 30, 2022
I liked Venom. It was trashy, it was stupid, critics hated it, but I liked it. Along comes a sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and I'm guessing I'm the audience for it, even if the critics once again hated it.
Well, I'm sad to say I didn't like Let There Be Carnage. I laughed at the first few scenes, because I expected to laugh and so I did. Until I realized it wasn't actually all that funny. Which left the trash and the stupid. By the time the movie ended (after a merciful 97 minutes) I found myself questioning whether I really liked the original all that much.
The key to these movies is the relationship between Eddie and Venom ... it's a buddy movie between a human host and alien symbiote. It doesn't work in this sequel, and I'm afraid to watch the first one again because I don't want to think it sucked, too.
I liked it more than Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle did, but mostly because it would be impossible to like the movie less than did LaSalle. "It’s the worst movie Tom Hardy ever made. It’s the worst movie Woody Harrelson ever made. And it’s the worst movie Michelle Williams ever made.... it’s one of the worst movies of 2021. In fact, in a happier year, it might even be one of the worst things to have happened that year."
[Letterboxd list of Geezer Cinema movies]