Venom 2: Let There Be Garbage - Movie Review

Venom 2 is out! It's called Venom Let There Be Carnage and it's really just Venom 1 again with the occasional smattering of carnage in the mix. So if you loved Venom, see more movies. What? What Venom living inside of me right now? I should tell them to subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell? Okay, subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell! Speaking of talking to yourself, there's a lot of scenes in the new film where Eddie Brock is talking out loud to Venom, but Venom talks in his head. So why doesn't Eddie Brock just talk in his head like, you know, reading a book? Does Eddie Brock read his books out loud when he's alone? Listen, you and I both know MCU kind of as a template. They follow a very strict formula, but that formula works. When they have the jokes, when they have the laughs, they usually stick, at least for me. When Venom, and especially Venom Let There Be Garbage, tries to do jokes, it misses pretty bad. There's a good cringe factor there. Chicken Out of the Bag, I wasn't a fan of Venom, the original. This one is the same movie again. I say Chicken Out of the Bag because there's chickens in here. They're the best part. The chickens that just don't do anything are the best part of this film. The worst part about this is I'm probably going to have to see this again because I have a nine-year-old son who absolutely loves the first film. He likes the original Suicide Squad movie too. I feel like that's the demographic for this. The dialogue, the writing in this is, I'd say it's about middle school level. Now, if you like the first Venom and you're a full-blown adult like me, calm down. I'm not insulting you, okay? You like crappy movies, that's okay. I like some crappy movies too. I just defended with my life Spider-Man 3, so I'm not acting like I'm above you here. These movies just don't work for me. And guess what, I have receipts to back it up. I have reasons for not liking specific types of films. This is not a pretty looking movie. The first one wasn't either. It's very ugly. It's taken place mostly at night. I mean, Sony has polish on their products usually, but this just, it looks bad. The CG ranges from that looks kind of good to that looks pretty bad throughout the movie. There's no consistency. The music is a collection of rap songs, which is, that's fine. I don't care. Eminem's got a track again at the end bringing his girl Skylar Grey with. Man, he's all in on Skylar Grey, isn't he? He's really trying to make her a thing. I just can't, I don't get it. Like, she's fine at most. There is a good amount of action. None of it's good. I didn't like a single set piece in the entire film. None of them were bad, but they were all, like, I just watched this whole movie sitting there just numb, just, just waiting for something exciting or interesting to happen. And that's how the first one was too. Just, it feels like a movie that was made in the late nineties, early two thousands when they first started really getting into the new generation of superhero films, like X-Men one and pre-Spider-Man like Blade, although Blade kicks ass and so does X-Men. So this is even worse than those. This would be like that Daredevil movie with Ben Affleck that people say the director's cuts better, in which I reply to them every time, is that playground fight scene still in there? And when they say nothing in response, I think I've made my point. But it's got Carnage, Adam, so therefore it's already better. Well, for a movie that has Carnage in the title, it sure doesn't seem very interested in the character because Carnage is not in it that much. It really is the same first film. We have Venom and Eddie Brock fighting constantly. They don't want to be connected anymore. And then by the end, here is a spoiler, they're going to learn to work as a team. Like, come on, we just saw that. And Tom Hardy's character as Eddie Brock is so completely nothing. I don't get him. I don't have any way to relate to him. There's just nothing there for the audience to feel emotionally attached to. He's very much like Owen from Jurassic World. Like, just a total boilerplate character. I don't know much about the comics, but I know Carnage was pretty badass because he could use his hands as weapons. He could make an axe or like a big mallet or something. Axe was kind of his go-to. I don't know if he did it. I think maybe he showed it a couple times, but he doesn't really use the thing. Very lackluster on the creativity here. So how is Woody Harrelson though? The guy always brings it, right? Well, he brings it. There's just not a lot to bring. We get this color book-y backstory that's really ugly. It looks really bad. The animation's just terrible on it. I don't like anything about it. And then to make matters worse, they superimpose the characters over the top. So it's just Eddie Brock with, you know, a green screen behind him like I'm doing. And you just have the scribble effects going around him. I didn't like it. I'm sorry. If you remember the ending of the first Venom film, Woody's there. He's got like a red afro. He's got kind of a carrot top look. I feel like he had freckles too. That's just gone. They don't even bother with that look in the sequel. It's like how Thanos changed from the first Avengers film to the 10 years later being a paler color, you know, just looks a lot more defined and different. They did that within one movie. They said, okay, this was a horrible design decision. Forget all that. Now his hair is flat. He's got no freckles. We're going this route. It is a better choice for sure. He does look more menacing. There's just really nothing to the character. And he has a girlfriend in this, a scream lady. She has a superpower where she can scream like Black Canary. It's Calypso from those Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. And every time she showed up, I was just thinking, man, I'd really rather be watching the Pirates of the Caribbean films than this. She's really kind of pointless in this film too. I get narratively why they added her in and some of the conflict it brought up, but it just didn't go very far. It was very unnecessary. There's also a couple Zack Snyder moments in this where something will just happen and then the story will move on instantly, leaving you scratching your head, wondering was that necessary? Is this going to even come up in a later movie or was that all for nothing? The movie's only an hour and a half long. It didn't even want to stick around for itself. Now, normally, I'm a big fan of movies that are shorter. I think less is more oftentimes. And this movie had really nothing going on. So hour and a half was fine with me. It gets in, it gets out, it tells the same story for half of it over again. By the time Carnage shows up, the movie's already almost over. If parents are on the fence whether or not to take their children, there's not a lot of swearing. It is PG-13. We still get the camera turning away when a head gets bitten off. There's a couple scenes that are a tad more violent, but I think you're fine. If your kids saw the first one, I don't think there's anything too unsettling here. If anything, it's a little toned down. There's a lot more humor, a lot more childish humor this time. Venom is just a straight up douche bro in this one. I mean, he kind of wasn't the first, but now he really is the physical manifestation of a monster energy drink. No, a rock star energy drink. He's got that Chad Kroger vibe going on. And speaking of the stupid writing in this, I have to point this one scene out. It's not a spoiler. It's in the commercials where, you know, Carnage is walking to the camera and he's getting shot by the cops in the prison. This is the first time anybody has seen this character, this alien creature. He's killing a bunch of cops left and right, and the prisoners escape. And the first reaction the prisoners have to this mammoth, insane looking, scary creature is, yeah, yeah, Carnage is killing the cops. Come on. Not a single one of them's like, no one is shocked by this at all. And even Woody Harrelson's character, Cletus, who Carnage has taken over, doesn't bat an eye about it. He's like, cool beans. I'm Carnage now. Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. He walks away from the prison singing a song. Not a single question asked to Carnage, like, what are you? Where did you come from? Why are you inside of my body? Just goes with it. Full stop. We have an end credit scene that's going to make you go, whoa. Now I'll stop thinking about the rest of this crappy movie and focus on this one cool little part that probably won't even amount to much at the end of the day. Who knows? Who cares? Hey, if you saw the movie and absolutely loved it, let me know in the comments below how wrong I am. If you didn't see it and you just want to talk to me, that's fine too. Put it in the comments. Like the video if you had a good time, subscribe to the channel if you haven't, and hopefully I'll catch you next time. Don't you hate in movie trailers where there's a line of dialogue that you expect to see in the movie and it doesn't happen? I'm pretty sure that's a thing that happens in Venom 2 because they kept waiting for Cletus to look at the camera and say, all I ever wanted was Carnage. He doesn't say that. He says like, all I ever wanted was family or friends or something. Like he's Dom or some ----. Once again, this is Fast and the Furious. All right, that's all I had to say. Join me on Patreon, patreon.com slash adamdoesmovies, or hit the join button on YouTube. Bye.