Venom 2 - Let There Be Carnage

Im zweiten Teil geht es eher um digitale Monster als um Hardy. Außerdem um zwei digitale Monster, die in einem Schwarzweißfilm gleich aussehen würden. Auf der anderen Seite ist Venom "auf eigenen Beinen" unterhaltsam und sein Besuch der Party gehört zu den besten Momenten. Die Negativgestalten sind nicht besonders furchteinflößend. Ihre Beweggründe sind mangelhaft und die Interaktion mit ihrem Umfeld wirkt leichtsinnig. Dies trifft auf mehrere Dinge in dem Film zu. Das digitale Fest am Ende ist dunkel und überladen. Es war mir völlig egal, wer wen wohin wirft, wer wohin fällt und was auf ihn fällt. Hardy auf dem Motorrad ist super und Michelle Williams… Michelle Williams! Sie verleiht dem Film die notwendige Ästhetik. Ohne sie hätte ich den Film mit zwei Sternen bewertet. (13.10.2021)

If I were to write that the Venom 2 was as uninteresting and unimaginative as the first one, I'd be bullshitting, because I don't remember anything from the first. But it's certainly uninteresting and uninspired. Tom Hardy's cool, so is Woody Harrelson. Michelle Williams and Naomie Harris are solid actresses, but they're given little space. In fact, everything has a little space. Venom isn't even a hundred minutes long, and unfortunately a good third of the running time is taken up by weird sitcom outtakes about Eddie Brock and Venom's cohabitation, where the film tries to pretend it's a variation on The Odd Couple, only with an alien. Occasionally, the film remembers that it has a serial killer and his symbiotic friend in there, so it skips to a random action scene and try to pretend to be horror. For an hour, nothing interesting actually happens except for Venom and Brock's arguments mixed with Harrelson's overacting (you can’t play a deranged serial killer in such a small space in any other way), only to end with a final clash with a lot of pretty solid visual effects and an unexpectedly solid length. And then the end. I won't remember any of it in a week. Again. (13.10.2021)

Nervig, generisch, ziellos erzählt. Hardy schwitzt vergeblich und das Ganze hat den gleichen Esprit wie die frühen Comic-Katastrophen, die fälschlicherweise als Blockbuster präsentiert wurden. (18.10.2021)

Venom 2 is such a disappointment that I feel like giving it 2 stars, but that would be biased, so a neutral 3 with a bitter taste in my mouth and an exclamation point for next time. Venom was a pleasant surprise, maybe because Ruben Fleischer was in charge of it, and he was able to handle the humour (Zombieland) and the action (Gangster Squad). Unfortunately, the sequel is directed by Andy Serkis (who has only done Mowgli) and suddenly the humour and action stops working. Tom Hardy is surprisingly unlikeable in this film and I didn’t enjoy his role at all, he's not funny or interesting, he doesn't show anything in action, in short a useless, uninteresting and boring character, and Woody Harrelson, whom I generally like, also didn't show much of anything – their dialogue exchanges are uninteresting and I didn't enjoy listening to them at all, I silently remembered the dialogue from Bond, yes, a strange comparison, but when they give dialogue clashes between two great actors, let me feel the intense darkness in the air, not these childish exchanges. Humour could have been a strong point, but I only laughed once in the whole film and that was with Venom at the disco, the rest is infantile and you don’t even smile. Nobody laughed at all in the cinema, so it's not just me. The Gore is missing of course, but I counted on it. The visuals and the effects are inoffensive, but definitely not breathtaking. Shortening the film to 90 minutes hurts the the film because it practically has no story and everything is rushed. On the other hand, if ti was two hours long, I probably wouldn’t last, because Venom 2 is not very entertaining. And now about the action. There are two short action scenes that end before they even start and then a half hour finale that I won't tell you anything about because I was asleep with boredom, so I'll have to recap that sometime. Anyway, going into Venom thinking it was a comic book action flick and leaving as bored and frazzled as a two-hour Drama, I didn't expect that in the slightest. Ironically, the post-credit scene is better than the movie itself. Story 2/5, Action 3/5, Humor 2/5, Violence 0/5, Fun 3/5 Music 3/5, Visuals 4/5, Atmosphere 3/5, Suspense 2/5, Emotion 1/5, Actors 3/5. 5/10. (16.10.2021)

Venom as a pro-migrant agitator and declared bisexual is the surprising revelation of this sequel. Nevertheless, Let There Be Carnage is a tiny bit better than part one. It passes by nicely and is funny in its silly way and its running time is short. As if Serkis simply cut the boring and unfunny bits out. Some of the twists and revelations appear very farfetched and all-of-a-sudden. Stress is on the marital quarrels of the continuously weirdly acting Hardy along with Venom, and all the other things surrounding this just happen to happen, god knows how. It lacks any logic. And it would just be a waste of time to go into analysis of degradation when compared to the source material. P.S.: Harrelson spends his time strangely overacting; this role is acutely uncomfortable for him. (27.11.2021)

A bit better than last time, mainly thanks to great villains. Woody Harrelson and Naomie Harris are like Bonnie and Clyde, only crazier, their escape is one of the best comic book movie scenes in recent memory in my opinion, and while I often grumble about unnecessarily long movies, this time a few extra dozen minutes would have been easily tolerable, if it had been devoted mostly to them. Otherwise, Andy Serkis didn't bring anything new to the director's chair, but he did a good job. Marco Beltrami composed unfortunately similarly bland music as Ludwig Göransson before him, and Tom Hardy, the good actor, once again seemed to forget that he can act, and once again he goofs off (although, admittedly, a little less than four years ago). (22.01.2022)

Ein Film, der nur wegen einer Untertitelszene und Geld entstanden ist... In Hollywood haben sie talentierte Regisseure mit Visionen, vielversprechende aufstrebende Stars, gewöhnliche Handwerker und dann unterdurchschnittliche Routine-Darsteller, die es eigentlich nicht draufhaben, aber dem Studio nicht widersprechen werden. Und zu letzterer Sorte gehört nun auch Andy Serkis. Venom: Let There Be Carnage ist ein vollkommen klischeehafter Comic-Film, bei dem man aufgrund des abgenutzten Drehbuchs, gelangweilter schauspielerischer Leistungen und chaotischer Schnitte nicht viel Spaß haben wird. Alles ist offensichtlich dem PG-13-Rating unterworfen, sodass man sich während des Films oft nicht einmal sicher ist, wie dieser oder jener Charakter tatsächlich endete, weil alles so "sicher" geschnitten ist, dass man nichts weiß. Und die Komödie ist durchweg infantil. Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, dass alle Beteiligten aus einem anderen Grund daran beteiligt waren, als den Gehaltsscheck zu bekommen. (19.10.2021)

Auf den zweiten Venom passt die Beschreibung "(genau) One-View-Action-Film" perfekt. Storytechnisch gibt es nicht viel zu überraschen - außer vielleicht, wenn ich mir selbst zuvorkomme, die Titelszene - und bei einer relativ kurzen Laufzeit bleibt nicht wirklich viel Raum für irgendwelche Plot-Twists (vielleicht nur ein winziger). Die Filmemacher setzen hauptsächlich auf Action, leichten (schwarzen und roten) Humor und Interaktion zwischen den beiden "Aliens", was nicht immer funktioniert. Die Figur der Frances "Banshee" Barrison wurde weitgehend unterbewertet, was schade ist. Ein flottes, stellenweise vielleicht ein etwas zu digitales Projekt für (wirklich) nur eine Vorführung! (17.10.2021)

I don't even want to get too much into this movie because I'd feel like I was kicking a disabled person. It's actually fascinating to watch a $110M piece of work that seems like every other scene was being concocted while the previous one was being filmed. An Olympics of the laziest screenwriting ("the governor of California decided to bring back the death penalty in light of these crimes" what the fuck?!). Kelly Marcel's role in Hollywood is to be given potentially problematic topics and then muddle them up in a way that doesn't offend anyone while still trying to appear superficially non-conformist. I don't know if they have no one better at Sony to do that, or if they just can't completely colonize certain topics, but nothing here holds together at all. (11.01.2022)