Who hurt Tom Hardy? Since Inception, Hardy has favored roles where his face is completely covered, he has to beat up people to survive, or prefers to live life alone or with a pet/alien symbiote. Or maybe that’s because if he opens up, serial killers come after him? Venom: Let There Be Carnage is at its best when it takes advantage of Hardy’s rare gift to act by himself, only occasionally stopping Carnage when the plot necessitates it.
After the events of 2018’s Venom, Eddie Brock (Hardy) has fully come to embrace his strange relationship with the symbiote Venom (voiced by Hardy; I guess he learned how to be friends with himself). They have rules for living together, which strains and exasperates them from time to time. Eddie’s reporting from the 2018 crazy story attracts the attention of Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson), a serial killer sentenced to death. Cletus uses his last moments to try to tell his life story through Eddie Brock, in hopes to hear from his lost love Frances (Naomie Harris). During their chats, Cletus bites Eddie, transferring some of Eddie’s symbiote into Cletus’s body, transforming him into a walking version of Carnage. Cletus uses his powers to try to track down Frances, and settle the score with the unsupportive Eddie. Not good for Brock, since Venom and him are in a fight and not helping one another.
It’s pretty easy to see why the producers tapped Andy Serkis to direct the Venom Sequel. The king of playing CGI characters would definitely know how to extract the most out of Tom Hardy acting next to a CGI shapeshifter. The Brock/Venom Odd Couple relationship is the amoebous backbone of this movie. Watching Hardy argue with himself must have been a blast behind the scenes, because in front of the camera the movie comes alive the minute a Venom/Brock argument kicks into high gear. We even get a Ted like fight where Hardy fights himself as he filings his body through tables and furniture in a fight with a CGI creation that doesn’t exist. Serkis ups the ante on the ludicrous side too, putting Venom in some outrageous places he hasn’t been in the past. The sillier Venom acts the more fun and exciting the movie becomes, content to keep the stakes low most of the time.
The other half of the title of this Venom movie is Let There Be Carnage. So we’re gonna need to see this fan favorite bad guy in his full swagger and menace. And that’s where Venom 2 falls apart. The Cletus stuff is from another, more R Rated Venom script, that’s WAY less silly and way more…killy? Nope, murdery. That’s the one. My same note from the 2018 Venom applies here: Let There Be Carnage would have been a gnarly R Rated movie, really showing the violence these symbiotes can inflict. Instead, Serkis has to work under probably a studio mandated PG-13, neutering the most compelling parts of Carnage’s character: his murder rampages are way less bloody, and happen offscreen. Plus, the joyless Carnage sequences suck all the fun out of the Brock/Venom relationship that had been building nicely to that point.
I’m hoping then that our next Venom movie goes full silly and just deals with the Brock/Venom odd coupling, solving police cases along the way. I also would like that full R Rating next time too. You know what would make this movie way more twisted and silly, a Hardy/Michelle Williams/Venom 3 way sex scene, as teased in the 2018 movie. These Venom movies are dying to be more demented and warped with their sense of humor, so come on Sony, let our symbiotes….symbiote.