Summary
Sony’s corner of the Marvel franchise manages to keep Venom weird while still doing pretty much what they did the first time around.
Cast your minds back to the Before Times of 2018. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle got married. The #MeToo movement went global. Venom became a surprise hit, joining Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in an attempt at putting Sony’s mini Marvel universe back on the map.
Cut to 2021. As the MCU rapidly expands, and the multiversal Spider-Man: No Way Home is just on the horizon, the unlikely duo of Tom Hardy and a sentient pile of black alien goo are back to win our hearts and minds. For a major studio comic book film, it’s a surprisingly insular world that takes every opportunity to celebrate the delightful weirdness of a certain era of comics.
When we left journalist Eddie Brock (Hardy), he was interviewing serial killer Cletus Kassidy (natural born killer Woody Harrelson). This film picks up more or less where that left off, via a flashback to St. Estes Home for unwanted children. A young Kassidy meets and falls in love with the super-powered Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris), who is later taken away to Ravencroft Institute. In the present day, an encounter between Brock and Kassidy leads to the latter being infected with his own symbiote known as Carnage. When he busts loose from death row, all hell breaks loose on the path to a final showdown.
In fact, it doesn’t take long for the 1990s pairing of Venom and Carnage to come to loggerheads. As with the first film, it’s chaos on wheels, but this time it’s a little bit self-aware and as a result, a lot more fun. Very consciously acknowledging of its own limitations, this sequel serves the shameless fanservice machine nicely, as it veers from introduction to final fight with scant regard for any development in between. It does give us a terrific set-piece, including Carnage’s prison escape sequence.
Yet more than anything, the true joy to this film is in the weird romantic comedy leanings. Yes, there’s the will they/won’t they subplot with Eddie and Anne (Michelle Williams), although her affable fiancé Dan (Reid Scott) is genuinely likeable (albeit occasionally superfluous) as a comic foil. However, it’s the odd couple of Eddie and Venom that bring the most joy to the film, constantly squabbling and denying their bond. In a truly bizarre sequence, Venom (inhabiting another body) goes to a nightclub and gives a heartfelt speech about pride.
Even so, director Andy Serkis — a name synonymous with bringing humanity to motion capture — can’t entirely avoid some of the pitfalls of this kind of picture. Despite the two big stars in the lead, and the clear visual influence from Todd McFarlane and Carnage co-creator Mark Bagley, the final battle is effectively a black CG blob fighting a red one. The effects are top notch and state of the art and all that, and I’m not going to pretend the comic geek in me wasn’t digging some of it, but an engaging narrative it is not.
Still, as we come to conclusion that wouldn’t seem out of place in a rom-com, it’s hard to not have some affection for this truly and endearingly odd film. As the MCU has done with Ant-Man, Sony have created a lower stakes and mostly self-contained set of pictures that want nothing more than to fill you eye sockets for a few hours. Yet as the mid-credits sequence points to a bigger story in Brock’s future, Venom may just have to learn to share him with the superhero world.
2021 | USA | DIRECTOR: Andy Serkis | WRITER: Kelly Marcel | CAST: Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Naomie Harris, Reid Scott, Stephen Graham, Woody Harrelson | DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures | RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 24 November 2021 (AUS)
