Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

(Amazon Streaming, April 2022) Considering my very mild appreciation of the first Venom, I’m as surprised as anyone to note that I liked sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage slightly more than the first one… at least in bits and pieces. Clearly leaning on the comedic elements of the first film and delivering plenty of winks and outright nods at the fannish shipping of Tom Hardy and his pet symbiote (all the way to couple-like bickering and a public coming-out declaration), Let There Be Carnage is looser and freer to play with established characters. The first half-hour of the film may be its best, as it goes for somewhat-imaginative odd-couple comedy, some good character moments and occasionally fulfills the innate craziness of its premise. Things get increasingly more conventional after that, ending not with a climax but a thud of an overextended gothic action sequence involving CGI characters fighting in a CGI cathedral with very little natural excitement emerging from its synthetic conclusion. Still – it’s snappier than its predecessor, Hardy is fine, Woody Harrelson doesn’t do too badly and Naomie Harris is suitably scary/sexy as a villain who ends up being a check on a worse villain. While Let There Be Carnage isn’t necessarily better than the good parts of the first film (nothing tops the wild chase sequence through the streets of San Francisco, for instance), it doesn’t have as many of the lows of its predecessor, and that explains part of why it’s an improvement, with the other part being going past the character’s origin story to become more comfortable with its own strengths. Much will be said about the mid-credit scene tying the series back into the all-consuming MCU, but really – did you expect anything different? Now let’s see where this goes.