LM23 Rating: Wait and stream or rent.
I don’t remember a lot of the first installment of Venom except that it never felt like a Marvel/DC superhero like movie. I’m not certain what the superpowers are of Venom except he looks like a really bad CGI snake creature stuck in a man’s body. The only reason why I went to the movies to see Venom 2 is that there’s not a lot of interesting movies available and this is considered another big Marvel movie, so why not?
One of the biggest spoilers of Venom 2 that I was hearing about was the movie was only 90 minutes. This “spoiler” may have signalled for some that the movie probably sucks. I found it very ironic that even though the movie was really short, it still felt like it was more than 2 hours long once the mid credit scene rolled.
In the next installment of Venom, we find Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) having gotten used to life with his alter ego living inside of him. And it seems even Mrs. Chen the owner of the convenient store has also gotten used to the random snake living inside one of her regular customers.
This shows you how much of a fan I am of Venom, I totally missed the fact that Eddie was an investigative journalist. I didn’t understand why he was meeting with Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) for a death row prison interview until I realized that that was part of his job as a journalist.
The movie opens very strongly with the origin story of the latest nemesis for Venom. Gorgeous stop motion animation is woven into the story of Cletus Kasady and how he met his future wife, Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris), in a creepy boarding school/prison for juvenile delinquents. But after this introduction, the movie pretty much takes a dive and doesn’t come back.
Although I like all of the actors in the film including Tom Hardy, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Williams, and Naomie Harris, I think all are miscast for a movie like Venom. Tom Hardy is a talented actor and I loved him in Mad Max: Fury Road, but his acting in Venom may be too brooding and moody to anchor a Marvel movie. Although there were a lot of funny bits in Venom 2, it wasn’t like that same kind of snarky, cool kids, we can have a moment of levity believable funny. The humor seems somewhat out of place for this film. The state of Eddie’s apartment even after he cleans it up from Venom’s mayhem is still depressing and that’s how this film comes off as.
Anne Weying (Michelle Williams) meets with Eddie to show him her engagement ring. Even this is unnecessary. How many people do this in real life? Why would she bother with Eddie just to rub it in his face that she’s moved on and is engaged? I don’t remember Eddie and Anne breaking up in the first Venom but if they have broken up, it would have been better if Anne’s character not return and maybe have a new love interest or no love interest at all.
Woody Harrelson has a lot of practice playing psycho killer crazies (Natural Born Killers, anyone?), but I think a younger actor should’ve played Cletus Kasady aka Carnage. The math didn’t really work as when we watched Cletus’ origin story, the time stamp was I believe 1996. Woody Harrelson went to school with former Vice President Mike Pence. Neither would have been that young in 1996. Not trying to be ageist here, but maybe they should’ve left out the year in the story of Cletus and that distracted me for the rest of the movie. It kind of reminded me of how in Hobbs & Shaw, the audience was supposed to stretch their imagination to believe that Jason Statham’s character is just a few years older than Vanessa Kirby’s character, but in real life there’s like a 20-year difference.
The plot of Venom 2 is that Cletus bites Eddie’s hand when they meet in jail and Cletus somehow turns into the bad guy, Carnage, after ingesting some of the blood from Eddie’s hand. That I didn’t really understand, but I guess that’s how easy it is to become Carnage.
The bromance between Venom and Eddie is apparently over as they get into a huge blowout where Venom busts up Eddie's entire apartment including his precious $2,000 television. Eddie then basically breaks up with Venom and Venom goes off to live his best life on his own.
I kind of stopped paying attention to the movie after a while and even went for a bathroom break, so I can’t quite remember why Carnage was after Eddie/Venom. Either way, the movie ends up being another typical guy needs to save girl story where of course Anne is kidnapped by the bad guys and Eddie and Venom need to go save her.
I think the only interesting and effective character in the whole movie was Frances Barrison/Shriek. You can tell that she only uses her killer screams when pushed to, and she does know when to draw the line. Like when Carnage is going to hurt Anne, and Shriek steps in to tell Cletus that that was going too far. But we didn’t have enough of that depth in the movie.
Even the ending mid-credit scene that everyone was buzzing about was anticlimactic for me. Everyone’s all excited because Spider-Man shows up on Eddie’s TV in his what looks like a Mexican hotel room. I think the only thing that gets me excited is I think the true potential of the Venom character would be unlocked if Venom can play off of other strong, leading Marvel characters.
A big weakness of Venom is that the main character doesn’t have a strong supporting cast which makes the movie feel very small despite being a Marvel backed film. It just feels too “ordinary” despite the random special effects.
For those who love these types of movies, definitely go see a matinee showing. But for the rest of us, I think you can get by with streaming it at home or waiting to rent it.
Comments