Venom: Let There Be Carnage

The Symbiote Rom-Com We Didn't Know We Needed

I still can’t quite believe Tom Hardy got a studio to bankroll a Marvel movie that plays like a deranged domestic farce, but I’m glad he did. The first *Venom* was a mess of clashing tones, and it only really came alive when Hardy was sweating through shirts, twitching, and climbing into that lobster tank. *Venom: Let There Be Carnage* doesn’t even pretend to be a grim superhero origin story anymore. It tosses that idea aside and becomes a loud, very odd ninety-minute comedy about a man and the alien living inside him trying not to murder each other over household rules. It’s absurd. It’s also weirdly delightful.



Andy Serkis taking over as director is a strange but smart fit. He spent years giving digital creatures souls through motion capture, and here he doesn’t aim for grandeur or realism. He goes straight for the relationship squabbling. Eddie Brock and Venom (both Hardy, in different registers) behave like a couple well past the honeymoon stage. They fight about food. Venom wants brains. Eddie wants to keep his head down and repair his reporting career. The breakup scene, with Venom trashing the apartment before storming off into a rave to go discover his “authentic self,” is so committed to the bit that it somehow works. The reason it works, really, is Hardy. He sells the bodily exhaustion of sharing space with this creature. Those hunched shoulders and that constant damp panic give the digital mayhem a human center.



Woody Harrelson barrels in as Cletus Kasady, a serial killer who picks up his own symbiote after biting Eddie. Harrelson is clearly enjoying himself, channeling a little *Natural Born Killers* chaos as he goes. With Naomie Harris beside him as his screaming, superpowered bride, Cletus becomes the ugly reflection of Eddie’s setup. Cletus and Carnage want exactly the same thing. Eddie and Venom don’t, and that friction is the whole movie. The finale in the gothic church edges close to the usual superhero sludge—lots of noise, lots of digital goo, lots of bodies smashing through stained glass—but Serkis wisely keeps nudging the focus back to the emotional dysfunction. Or at least as much emotional dysfunction as giant symbiote monsters can manage.



The movie’s sneakiest virtue may be that it gets in and out fast. At barely ninety minutes, it never swells with lore or franchise housekeeping. Kate Erbland at *IndieWire* put her finger on it: "There doesn’t need to be carnage (or, hell, even Carnage), there just needs to be Venom, and more of it." Exactly. The villains are fine, but they mostly exist to interrupt the real attraction, which is Tom Hardy bickering with himself. Whether that sounds unbearable or irresistible probably depends on your appetite for camp. I had a great time. A sweaty wreck trying to set boundaries with the alien in his spleen is simply more fun to watch than another solemn hero saving the planet.