FILMS OF 2021: VENOM: LET THERE BE GARBAGE

Venom: Let There Be Garbage

A film utterly let down by a woeful third act, that was lazy, visually incomprehensible, badly edited and just plain boring, as if the writer and director suddenly remembered they had to have a big showdown cgi punch up and just wedged one in to it. "Hey," said the writer, "the first Batman movie had a cathedral in it, so let's put one in this!"

It's a showdown so dull that Andy "There but the grace of God go I." Serkis couldn't even be bothered to give us an establishing shot for the final showdown, or layout the geography of the fight between Venom and Garbage. By this stage in the movie, he probably thought what's the point?

However before this low mark we have quite a funny film, or at least bits that are funny, like when Eddie and Venom are bickering, particularly when Venom becomes a sort of therapist, and Tom Hardy's verbal fighting as both characters is a treat, it just really didn't need Carnage, although that said it does need Cletus (Woody Harrelson).

Carnage just never feels like anything other than a shoe-horned in character there just to give Venom something to fight. And once again it's that fight that's the weak point of the whole movie. The last three super hero films I've seen have all felt diminished by the need to have a big climatic fight at the end. At least this one wasn't Earth threatening.

There's also a major problem with Carnage. He, or it, he's never clear on his preferred pronoun choice, is so spectacularly over-powered compared to Venom that it renders the final showdown bland and boring. There is literally nothing it can't do.

And Questions as to where it and Venom get their vast supplies of extra mass from are never explained, nor are any rules as to their abilities established beyond the fact Venom needs to eat chocolate and chicken heads on a regular basis. Instead we just sit there and watch two cgi monsters blurringly fight in near darkness until one of the emerges the victor. And frankly there's never any doubt as to the outcome.

You come out feeling sorry for Tom Hardy, he gives it his all but his Eddie Brock is such an unlikeable character that it's hard to feel any sympathy for him at all and it's Venom who steals the show, but only when we don't see him.

As this is a sequel, it'll come as no surprise that true to the classic form of story telling, the boy loses the girl, or alien symbiote, and has to win him back to save the day.

I saw the original at the cinema and cannot remember a single thing about it, so unmemorable was it. I doubt I will remember this one either.

4/10