Venom - Let There Be Carnage

Carnage Hall

Venom - Let There Be Carnage
USA/UK/Canada 2021
Directed by Andy Serkis
Marvel Studios/Columbia

Warning: Slight spoilers
concerning the mid-post-credits scene.

The first Venom movie (reviewed here) really shouldn’t have worked at all. Without the Spider-Man character as a catalyst for the look of the ‘suit’ that is Venom, it really doesn’t make much sense, either. However, despite the bizarre gymnastics to get the character into a stand alone film and giving him a totally new origin story (which, as I said, makes no sense), the first movie was a really fun, good time at the cinema... so I was more than happy to reacquaint myself with the character for a second movie.

The film once again stars Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock/Venom and Michelle Williams as his ex-girlfriend... and, as teased in the post-credits scene of the last movie, we have Woody Harrelson back as serial killer Cletus Kasady. Kasady becomes Carnage in this move in the most totally unlikely and unconvincing way, it has to be said. The film also features modern Miss Moneypenny Naomie Harris as a version of Shriek from the comics.

So all well and good and I’m here to say that the sequel, Venom - Let There Be Carnage, is a fun if frothy and insubstantial sequel to the first movie (well, even more insubstantial than the first movie at any rate). Certainly, the film is all about the humour as Eddie Brock and Venom try to live with each other and much of the film’s comedy comes from them trying to work out a few kinks in the symbiotic relationship. So there’s a scene played for laughs where Venom is trying to cook up a breakfast for Eddie to cheer him up after he has been heartbroken by the impending marriage of his ex, where he practically wrecks everything in the kitchen in the pursuit of culinary delight. There’s also a nicely done ‘break up’ scene where the two have a massive argument and go their separate ways in the movie for a while, just as Carnage comes into play and Cletus/Carnage is hunting down Eddie for a quick fix of revenge.

And it’s all... fine. Just fine.

It’s also, maybe, a bit of a mess. There’s nothing much but gloss and, coupled with the fact that the movie runs for just over an hour and a half, which is a nice running length for a movie normally, it feels like it’s finished before it’s even begun properly. The resolution, such as it is, just feels one or two set pieces light before you should be getting to that point and maybe, it turns out, a two hour running time is best suited to movies with big, modern, mythical characters. Which is strange because the action all feels epic but the scope of the story does not. Very little actually happens which is why it’s lucky we have some great performances to carry the movie by the likes of Tom Hardy and Woody Harrelson here. Without actors of this pedigree, I suspect that this movie might have really dragged.

I still don’t think the imagination is quite there for the alien symbiotes in these movies though. Venom, as CGI and fluid a character as he is, still feels like some guy standing around in a suit (even if, you know, he isn’t) and, okay, the precedent has been set for that character in the previous movie so it’s fine to go with that here. But, the real problem is that Carnage, who always looked really ragged, edgy and dangerous in the comics (at least from the cover art that I remember) really doesn’t look all that different from Venom in the movie. He’s red and a little more scrappy for sure but, I felt they really needed to go to town a little bit more on the visualisation of the character in this to give him a more distinctive feel. I just felt he needed to be a bit more splintered from reality and all over the place but, still, the character works fine as a psychotic version of Venom to an extent and it looks fine on screen... it just doesn’t really feel as perilous as Harrelson’s pitch perfect reading as human serial killer Kasady, it has to be said.

But it’s still a nice blend of comedy and action and the scenes with Peggy Lu playing the grocery shop owner Mrs. Chen build on the ones from the first movie and should definitely make you smile. There’s also an extra added dimension to where things go at the end of the movie. While Venom is trying to show Eddie some of the things it knows about the universe at the end of the movie, something happens to them which transports them to a different aspect of the multiverse and they end up in a hotel room watching J. Jonah Jameson’s reveal that Peter Parker is Spider-Man... a different look at one of the post credits scenes from Spider-Man - Far From Home. Which means two things. One, the Venom moves are officially crossing over with the current Marvel Cinematic Universe and two, the various multiverses are beginning to collide. I can’t guess for sure as to whether this happens before Doctor Strange messes up the spell in the next movie... after all, this could be a reason that original post-credits scene happened but, saying that, going by the first trailer for Spider-Man No Way Home, the spell appears to get cast as a reaction to something similar happening in the first place so... yeah, I guess the jury’s out on that one.

Anyway, speculation aside, if you liked the initial stand alone Venom movie then you should have an okay time with Venom - Let There Be Carnage. It doesn’t have a great deal going for it but it is suitably entertaining and that’s more than enough reason to go see a movie anyway, right? So it’s fine.

The Greatest Showman

What a P.T.

The Greatest Showman
USA 2017 20th Century Fox
Directed by Michael Gracey
Blu Ray Zone B

Ahh, Christmas time. That magical time of the year when you’re confronted by the ghost of watching films you really didn’t want to see because you bought them for relations who did. Such is the case with the musical motion picture The Greatest Showman, which stars Hugh Jackman as P. T. Barnum in what I can only describe as a somewhat sympathetic, rose tinted humbuggery version of that man’s life. I think the last time I saw a production about Barnum it was also big on sentiment and less enthusiastic about selling a more genuine embodiment of the spirit of the man but, that’s okay, I guess that kind of sensationalist pursuit is, in some ways, doing just that... in a roundabout way.

That previous time I saw a Barnum musical it was in 1981 at the London Palladium in a stage musical which was literally just called Barnum... and it had Michael Crawford in the title role (I think ex-Carry On star Jim Dale did it in America, if memory serves). And, though it’s not completely fair, especially since The Greatest Showman is in no way an adaptation or remake of that production, I shall do the obvious and make my one and only comparison to the stage show and say... I still remember some of the songs from the 1980s show. The songs in The Greatest Showman seem, somehow, a little flat and unmemorable in comparison.

That being said, I’m going to hedge my bets here and remember I gave a disasterous review to another recent musical, La La Land (you can read it here if you like), only to discover that, once the songs were stuck in my head, I absolutely loved the movie from my second showing onwards and would happily screen it for myself every year if there weren’t so many other movies to watch. And, seeing as I didn’t hate the songs in The Greatest Showman, I’m guessing that they will soon grow on me if I heard them again so, although I’m not likely to get to it anytime soon, I suspect that if I’d waited and wrote this review after a second viewing, it would be more favourable than what I’ve got to say about it this first time around. So sorry but... first impressions will just have to do.

Those impressions being that... it’s not a bad film. It has some nice segues from one scene to another and some clever choreography on some of the musical numbers... such as the scene where Jackman’s Barnum is trying to persuade Zac Efron’s character to join forces with him in a dance at a bar with flying glasses and bottles... or a sequence where Efron dances with his love interest, played by Zendaya using the ropes of her profession as a trapese artist.

And the performances are all fine too... especially Hugh Jackman, who I always find is worth the price of admission, so to speak. Michelle Williams is equally sparkling as Barnum’s wife Charity and Rebecca Ferguson fairly twinkles as famous singer Jenny Lind. There’s also an edge to the writing in terms of giving the characters a less predictable nature and by far my favourite character was a critic who seems to have hated Barnum but here, it seems, is given a little more three dimensionality in terms of the way he reacts to situations and he’s wonderfully brought to life in this by some guy called Paul Sparks. So all well and good and... combined with some nice colour palettes and some beautiful sets... part of me thinks I should maybe have gone to the cinema to see this one.

However, my main problem... and I can see how this could always be a problem when cinematic fantasies have one foot in reality such as biographical pictures... is that the plot seems absurdly simple. This film has less twists and turns than a Roman road and, while I should probably be applauding simplicity in modern cinema... I don’t know, it just seemed to me like there was no real drama to get my teeth into here, no matter how good the performances were. And they were very, very good.

I guess that, while I did invest in the main protagonists to some extent, I never felt like there was much at stake for any of the characters and I just didn’t feel the need to root for them enough. Which is a shame because there was obviously a lot of time and care put into this production. However, that being said, I’m one of only three people I know who didn’t think it was all that people had said it was (my two viewing companions were of the same opinion as me on this one) and everywhere else... well, I’ve not heard a bad word said about it and it’s been very successful. So I’m kinda glad about that since there’s obviously no small amount of work gone into bringing this tale to the screen.

And that’s me done, I’m afraid. The Greatest Showman didn’t really inspire me as much as it might and I wouldn’t whole heartedly recommend it to anyone... much less those who don’t like musicals (I love musicals myself). Not, quite, my cuppa tea but I suspect I may get turned around on that if I ever find myself plonked down in front of it again. Sometimes first impressions aren’t always right and, like I said... hedging my bets.

Venom

Venom Seed

Venom
2018 USA
Directed by Ruben Fleischer
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very slight spoiler in here.

Well this was a bit of a surprise.

I saw the trailer to Venom and it looked awful. This was followed up with a lot of negative, bad word of mouth comments on Twitter on the first couple of days of its release. However, I wanted to keep abreast of things because the Fox Marvel Universe looks like it will be properly merging with the Disney owned Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) any time now and so there’s a possibility that the character could be crossing over into that world at some point, possibly with the same actors attached.

What can I say? I may be out of step with the zeitgeist again because I had a really good time with it. There are a few issues (not as many as you might think from people’s reactions) but overall it’s a pretty great Marvel movie and I hope they make good on the promise of the first of the two extended post credits scenes (so that’ll be the mid-end credits scene then) at some point. So hoping for some good box office on this one but, judging from people’s reactions, it might not get it.

I’m not that up on Venom as a character, to be honest. He’s only about 30 years old and I think I’ve only ever read the first ten or twelve years of Spider-Man in the comics. But this highlights one of the biggest problems of this movie right there, in relation to this source material and its pretence to be an adaptation of it because, although there are Spider-Man universe references in it, the primary one being that J. Jonah Jameson’s son, the astronaut, gets a few brief shots at the start of the movie and the other being mention of Eddie Brock’s New York problems (I’ll get to the final post-credits scene soon), this incarnation of Venom has nothing to do with Spider-Man at all which is odd here because... well okay here’s why.

Venom first appeared as an alien symbiont in a Spider -Man story called Homecoming... which is what the last solo(ish) Spider-Man movie was called, right? The story was part of a big Marvel event called Secret Wars in the comic, which featured all the Marvel characters battling each other on an alien world. It’s here where Spidey picked up the black, alien symbiotic costume and, many issues later, got rid of it when it became the villainous Venom and bonded with, among others, reporter Eddie Brock. Now, we saw some of this story already on screen when it was used, alas minus the Secret Wars part, for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3. So I can half understand why they didn’t want to go down that route here and instead give him a new origin again (kind of, not really but I’m not going to condemn them for it) but we still have the problem that Venom still totally looks like Spider-Man.... because that’s who he first bonded with.

And that’s my biggest problem with the new movie. Venom bonds with Eddie Brock, played here quite comically by Tom Hardy who portrays him as a much more sympathetic character than I recall. And for the first twenty or so minutes after he bonds with Eddie, which in itself is a fair way into the movie... which is fine, it’s a slow burn... we don’t ever see him manifest as a full character and all the while I was thinking... oh, they’re doing this right. Soon he’ll see some footage or a picture of Spider-Man and that will justify him looking like the character. And that’s where they slipped up because, when Venom does manifest to Eddie and various others, he looks just like Spider-Man but with absolutely no justification for that. Which is what I was worried about when I first heard they were doing a stand alone Venom movie and, yeah, they really dropped the ball here.

Most everything else is great though. The movie takes time to build up the characters like Eddie, his former girlfriend Anne (played by Michelle Williams) and the movie’s main villain Carlton Drake (played really well by Riz Ahmed). And there’s even another symbiont (there’s a few actually but one other main one) which starts the movie as kind of a red herring because you assume it’s Venom but then it turns out... oh no it’s not. This character is useful in the early parts of the movie (and works much better then than in the end third of the film) because it allows the writers and director to play with the idea of the alien symbionts in almost a horror movie kind of way. This is something that’s further enhanced by Ludwig Göransson’s rather appropriate, almost cheesy riffs on a kind of 1950s style scary sci-fi approach to the scoring... which surprised me from this composer and is spot on for this. Well done to Sony for giving it a CD release at the end of next week. Much appreciated.

The musical style also changes when it needs to, especially when, somewhere in the last third or so of the movie, the tone shifts and it becomes an all out adventure Super Symbiont style action fest in the Mighty Marvel Manner (as they used to say in the comics). And this kind of works for the film too... it’s a fun watch with some nice, fast pacing and there’s even a brief appearance of a sexy Lady Venom at one point (or She-Venom as she was known in the comics, apparently). The point is, everyone is good and everything, more or less, follows through on story logic. I don’t know why people are saying it’s a mess and doesn’t make sense because, it clearly does... even if it does come off as a bit of a cross between the plotting of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here) and Rampage (reviewed here) at certain points.

I have only two other problems with it.

One is the time continuity. At the start of the picture we have a rocket crashing on Earth and then Eddie Brock brought in to to do a puff piece interview with Carlton Drake as damage control on that event. Soon after, we have a caption that reads “Six months later” and Eddie is in a bar watching a news item. All well and good except the news announcer is talking about that same rocket crash which happened... one month ago. I appreciate that the timing relocated to a longer period makes more sense with what’s happened in the progression of the characters in the intervening months... but if you’re going to slap a caption on there then make sure the dubbing on the news cast synchs up with it. Mind you, it’s not as bad as the appalling time continuity error made at the start of Spider-Man Homecoming (reviewed here) with it’s proximity to the events of The Avengers (aka Avengers Assemble, reviewed here) so I think we can let these guys off the hook on this a little.

What really made no sense however, especially after a quite cool, extended mid end credits sequence, was an extended post-credits end sequence which is an action scene from the new Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse movie released in December... especially as it seems to have absolutely nothing to do with Venom or the rest of the film. So that was a bit strange but not especially damaging to the rest of the picture, I guess.

So what else can I say? Despite the unbelievably bad word of mouth the movie has been getting, I thought this one was a really fun ride and there are a lot worse things you could be seeing at your cinema at the moment. It’s not super great but it’s certainly not a dud and it’s also got a memorable cameo from Stan Lee near the end of the picture. So if you are one of those fans who are fond of the old phrase “Make Mine Marvel”, I think you’ll find Venom is at least worth a look. I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

My Week With Marilyn

Marilyn Haste, Repent At Leisure!

My Week With Marilyn 2011 UK/US

Directed by Simon Curtis

Screening at

UK cinemas.

Funny how a little scrap of knowledge you pick up just before you start writing your review can dispel your main criticism of the subject matter. Doesn’t matter, still going to be a very short review and, in some ways, my enlightenment as to the source of the film I saw means I have even less to say about it than I did have when intending to put pen to paper, or in this case, intending to press fleshy fingertips against the cool, hard plastic keys of my Macbook.

The two brief points I was originally intending to make were that My Week With Marilyn is a pretty good film, well worth a watch and I was also going to go on to say, having read the diary it’s based on some years in the past (The Prince, The Showgirl and Me), that it didn’t quite make my Best Films of 2011 list because it was also a poor adaptation of the source.

However, now I’ve found out that My Week With Marilyn was based on, not one, but two accounts by the same writer (Colin Clark, played in the movie by Eddie Redmayne), I’d have to plead ignorance now as to whether this is a good adaptation or not as I haven’t read the other book.

What I can say, however, is that the movie has a very strong and positively star studded cast, even for the little walk on parts, and that everyone is extremely strong in their roles and this makes for a vastly entertaining movie which is well shot, pacily edited, has a nice jaunty score and doesn’t outstay its welcome in any way shape or form. There’s less emphasis given on the character of famous Sykes actor Richard Wattis than I would have expected from the book I read all those years ago, but ultimately it’s not a problem for me now I know the writers and producers were working from a dual source.

Special mention must go to Michelle Williams who really does successfully capture the flirtiness, confusion, insecurity and general sense of tragedy that was Marilyn Monroe a few years before her death. The performance (and script) are exactly as I have come to think of her from various written accounts through the years and it’s easy to see how she could have accidentally topped herself when she was in this state (if that is indeed what actually happened to her).

This is a really slick production and represents the time period in a bright and nostalgic way (as opposed to going with a more gritty, realistic approach) but the romanticisation of this period didn’t bother me in this one because it’s a quick effective way to bring the period to life and, also, because to someone who is perpetually in the limelight and roaming from interview to film set to camera flash, maybe the reality of the situation did seem somewhat altered by the reflection that a person’s choice of profession engenders.

The idea that Marilyn was a personae projected by Marilyn is very blatantly highlighted in this movie and the realisation of the character becoming lost in her own “legend” while still having very lucid moments of not being that image, really is not a bad thing to call to the attention of the audience of this film. It might even lead some of its viewers to explore the life of the titular character and some of the other famous names that come up... after following in his footsteps for so long as the “new Laurence Olivier”, I bet it was a real blast for Kenneth Brannagh to actually find himself playing the man in question.

I gave this one an honourable mention in my Best Films of 2011 list and would happily suggest that anyone who’s even remotely interested in the people captured in this roaring snapshot of a movie should check this one out... it’s rare that anyone playing Marilyn comes out on top as anything more than a caricature of the bottled screen presence of Norma Jean. This movie does things a little better than most.