Venom tears up Eddie Brock’s kitchen, and IGN’s comparison is exact: the scene looks lifted from the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence in Fantasia. A man’s home is wrecked by the creature living inside him, and the film plays it for slapstick. It is a fair sample of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Andy Serkis’s sequel to the 2018 film, which embraces its own absurdity and never apologises for it.

Where Ruben Fleischer’s first film wavered between tones, Serkis settles on silliness and stays there. Silver Screen Riot, which had little time for the original, calls the script a potty-mouthed stream of consciousness, almost written by a twelve-year-old’s horny id, and then admits that the film is “singularly of a piece with itself.” I side with the second half of that verdict. The jokes are crude, but they all point the same way, and that consistency is what the 2018 film lacked. The same outlet sells the central pairing as a roommate comedy, Beetlejuice meets The Odd Couple. Eddie has laid down a hardline “no murder” rule under his roof, and Venom essentially wants to chew off heads. The squabbles over that rule carry much of the picture.

Tom Hardy plays both halves of the marriage, Eddie and the symbiote, and the film treats the arrangement as farce. The Action Elite finds in his Eddie an appealing loser who needs Venom, and is needed in return, to reach their potential as a “Lethal Protector.” IGN goes a step further and repeats Serkis’s own description of the film as a love story between Eddie and Venom, a claim it says the lean script backs up. IGN also hears the symbiote’s one-liners as a mix of Clayface from the HBO Max Harley Quinn series and the MCU’s Drax, and it quotes Eddie’s own description of him: a “pig-dog horse-duck.” The weak point is plain intelligibility. The Action Elite admits that Venom’s speech is sometimes hard to follow and expects the film to benefit from subtitles when it reaches home video. A monster who gets the best lines should not need them.

Woody Harrelson is the other reason to go. The Action Elite says he never phones it in, and that he even manages to make us nearly sympathise with Cletus Kasady, a killer sentenced to death by lethal injection. IGN describes a villain whose motives are vengeful and driven by pain, which gives the casting a purpose beyond the obvious pleasure of watching Harrelson go big. Naomie Harris is the surprise. The Action Elite confesses to being unable to recognise Moneypenny in Frances Barrison, and admires the idea that the two villains are genuinely in love while the hero is unlucky in that department. The script sets two couples side by side: Eddie and Venom bicker like a pair on the edge of separation, while Cletus and Frances are bound together by a love the film asks us to take seriously. Next to that pair, Eddie and Venom look like the less functional relationship.

As a director, Serkis is plainly at home with the physical scenes. IGN credits his motion-capture background for the way the action reads, and praises a mix of practical and computer-generated effects that gives Venom’s destruction a tangible weight. The active camera, in IGN’s account, matches the cold-blooded, chaotic energy of Carnage and Kasady. The Action Elite concedes that the effects may be CG but found nothing to complain about, which is a rare thing to say about a superhero film. IGN also notices a pivot away from the sci-fi conspiracy of the first picture toward something closer to a serial-killer thriller in the vein of Seven or Zodiac, an odd template for a movie about a talking alien, yet one that gives the hunt for Cletus a shape. The film runs about 90 minutes, and The Action Elite is grateful to be spared the two-and-a-half-hour slog of most superhero movies these days. Marco Beltrami’s score, in The Action Elite’s words, is not especially memorable, though the epic choirs during the final showdown suit the spectacle.

The supporting cast is small and used with economy. IGN lists Stephen Graham’s Detective Mulligan, Michelle Williams as Anne, Reid Scott as Dan and Peggy Lu’s Mrs. Chen, and observes that their paths cross enough to make the world feel smaller and the threat to Eddie’s circle more personal. That is also the limit of what they are asked to do: they serve the two central duels, Eddie against Venom at home and Venom against Carnage in the street. At this running time the trade is a fair one.

Where does the film sit in the genre? The Guardian places the Venom series in an unofficial multiverse of its own, one that sidesteps the elevated, self-serious worlds of Marvel and DC and continues from the flashiness of the 90s Batman films. The same review calls this sequel admirably light-hearted but utterly disposable, and it is hard to argue with either adjective. The Action Elite adds that some of the violence felt cut, wonders whether an unrated director’s cut is coming, and then asks whether more gore would really make the film better. I agree with the doubt. The missing blood is not the problem. The problem is that the picture is built to be enjoyed for ninety minutes and then dropped: a handful of jokes and one wrecked kitchen are what follows you out of the cinema.

The public did not mind. Reviews were mixed, yet the picture grossed $506 million worldwide, the seventh-highest total of 2021, after the pandemic had pushed it back from an October 2020 date to a London premiere on September 14, 2021. Harrelson’s brief appearance at the end of the first film had already promised Carnage for the sequel, and the studio delivered it, with filming at Leavesden Studios and in San Francisco. A further film, Venom: The Last Dance, followed in October 2024.