Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a ninety-seven minute rom-com about a man and the alien parasite he can’t live with and can’t live without, and it’s a much better movie when it admits that’s what it is than when it remembers it’s supposed to have a supervillain in it. I went in expecting more of the loose, jokey energy from the first film, maybe with a flashier fight bolted on. What I got instead was Eddie and Venom playing house badly, breaking up properly, and getting back together in a church, and somehow that domestic mess is the part that works best.
Woody Harrelson shows up as Cletus Kasady and immediately looks like he’s having more fun than anyone else on set, which carries a lot of weight once Carnage actually arrives. I’ve watched a fair bit of Sony’s version of these characters against some of the other comic adaptations out there, and this is the first time one of them has felt genuinely comic-accurate to me instead of a studio’s careful approximation of the idea. Carnage is meaner, faster, and unhinged in a way Venom just isn’t, and the film knows exactly how to use that contrast even in the stretches where it doesn’t know what else to do with him.
Carnage arrives, and the film finally has teeth
The execution scene where Kasady’s symbiote fragment erupts is the moment this movie stops being cute and starts being a horror movie for about five minutes, and it’s the best five minutes in it. Harrelson plays Kasady as someone who’s been waiting his whole life for an excuse, biting off warnings from prison guards like he’s been rehearsing them, and once Carnage is loose the film lets him be genuinely dangerous instead of just a red recolor of the title character wearing a different voice.
What struck me watching it is how much better this version tracks with what I know of the character from the comics than Venom (2018) ever managed. That film spent its whole runtime justifying why Venom looked and acted the way it did, explaining the rules of the symbiote before it let itself have fun with them. This one just lets Carnage be Carnage: insane, fast, gleefully violent, and the film doesn’t apologize for any of it. It’s a small thing on paper but it’s the difference between an adaptation that trusts its source material and one that’s still hedging its bets on whether the audience will accept it.
The frustrating part is that Carnage doesn’t get nearly enough screen time once he’s loose. He arrives late, spends a chunk of the middle stretch off-page while the film handles other business, and then gets dispatched fast in the finale. Harrelson earns more than the script gives him room for, and I kept wanting the movie to trust him the way it trusts the relationship comedy.
The rave scene is doing more than anyone expected
Venom storms off alone partway through the film after a fight with Eddie, ends up body-hopping through a string of strangers, and lands on a nightclub stage mid-costume-party delivering a speech about being free to be itself, and it’s the strangest and most sincere scene in the whole movie. It plays like a coming-out sequence and doesn’t hide from it, which is a wild swing for a Sony comic book movie to take and land as well as it does. I found the specific choice to build it as a literal festival for the other more interesting than almost anything the plot does with Kasady, and it’s the scene I keep coming back to when I think about this film.
That’s the engine of the whole thing, really. Eddie wants his flat, his career, and to not get his head bitten off. Venom wants to eat criminals and be a hero. Neither one can actually leave the other, no matter how bad it gets between them, and that’s a genuinely unusual premise for this genre to hang a film on. It’s a domestic-comedy setup wearing a monster movie’s clothes, and every scene that leans into it is stronger than the scenes trying to be a conventional superhero showdown.
Frances Barrison and the plot the film forgets it set up
Naomie Harris plays Frances Barrison, Kasady’s childhood love, locked away for decades with a sonic scream that’s specifically lethal to symbiotes. The setup is careful. The film spends real time explaining exactly why she matters, who wronged her, and what her power can do, and then more or less drops all of it until the story needs a convenient way to end the final fight.
Shriek should be the film’s second engine and instead she’s a mechanism, which is the one place the script’s instincts fail it after getting so much else right elsewhere. It’s not that Harris is bad in the role. It’s that the film clearly ran out of time or interest to give her the same depth it gave Kasady, and the imbalance shows every time she’s on screen next to him.
The church finale brings everyone back together at once: Eddie and Venom reconcile after their fight, Carnage and Shriek converge on the same space, and Venom bites Kasady’s head off once Carnage accidentally kills Shriek with her own weapon. It’s messy in the way the whole back half is messy, rushed through plot machinery to clear space for the relationship beats that actually mattered to the people making this.
Ninety-seven minutes, and whether that’s a compliment
There’s something refreshing about a comic book movie that doesn’t ask for two and a half hours of my evening, that trusts the audience to keep up without three subplots and a mid-film lull. Coming off a decade of blockbusters that treat runtime as a flex, ninety-seven minutes felt almost generous.
But I could also feel the edges where things got cut. Shriek’s whole arc reads like a film that got trimmed hard in the room, and the jump from the rave scene to the church finale moves fast enough that I had to pause and check what I’d missed. Both readings are true at once: it’s a film that respects my time and a film that’s visibly been through the wringer to get that short.
That stinger, and what I want it to mean
Eddie and Venom end up in a hotel room that isn’t theirs, the television playing news footage of a masked hero’s identity getting exposed, and Venom saying it recognizes something. I know what everyone assumes this is building toward, the same way I know what happens at the end of Far From Home that’s clearly being referenced here. But nobody’s actually confirmed anything about a crossover yet, so I’m choosing to enjoy the anticipation instead of pretending I already know how it plays out. It’s the best kind of stinger, the kind where the guessing is more fun than knowing usually turns out to be.
I’d put this at a 3.5. It’s shorter than it needed to be and the villain plot gets away from it in the back third, but the relationship at the center is genuinely funny and occasionally strange in ways I didn’t expect, and Harrelson alone makes the back half worth sitting through even when the script isn’t giving him enough. Better than the first one, worse than I wanted it to be, and I’m already curious what that stinger turns into.
