Venom: Let There Be Cliches

By Mira Gillan, Staff Contributor

I’ll admit that I’m not a fan of Marvel movies, but out of the few I’ve seen, “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” is the worst one by far. The movie is riddled with cliches, stiff acting and an unfocused plotline that feels like it’s only meant to fill time.

The movie starts by overloading the viewer with so much trite dialogue that I thought it was a parody at first. Sadly, this is just how Marvel decided to introduce our main antagonists to us. Lines like “I’ll always love you” and “Any last words?” always leave a sour taste in my mouth because of how overused they are, and the fact that they go on to use them again later in the movie is just a show of how incompetent Marvel’s writers are.

Marvel tends to load their movies with jokes, which sometimes go over well. “Guardians of the Galaxy” still holds up well in my view as it doesn’t try too hard to be funny. On the other hand, “Let There Be Carnage” had very few jokes that landed. It seemed like they leaned heavily into the fact that Venom is loud and has an odd voice, but that kind of humor doesn’t appeal to me at all.

On a technical level, I expected more from the biggest movie studio in the world. Venom’s CGI looks unnatural at its best, and downright goofy at its worst. Most of the shots throughout the movie are tolerable, but they never do anything interesting. By comparison, 2018’s “Upgrade” has so much interesting camera work that I can justify sitting through a generic 100-minute revenge story — “Let There Be Carnage” has none of that even though the plot is just as generic.

The plot itself is severely underwritten, unfocused and predictable. There were numerous points during the movie where I would forget that I was supposed to be paying attention to something. It’s not like there’s so much fighting and action that the viewer is supposed to forget about the plot; the vast majority of the movie is spent attempting to develop the characters, which it doesn’t do that well. As I do with every movie, I make a couple of predictions once I know enough about the characters, and I was correct with every prediction. They didn’t stray from their basic formula once.

Although the plot itself is painfully generic, it could’ve been made up for if Venom and Eddie had a good dynamic, but they don’t. There’s almost no chemistry between their personalities. There are a couple of scenes where the writers felt the need to blatantly state that the two were “made for each other,” but I still wasn’t buying it.

All in all, “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” is generic, unfunny and boring. I nearly walked out of the theater towards the end just because of how angry one single line made me. One would think that with a budget of over $100 million that Marvel would be able to write a competent script that isn’t strictly copied and pasted from nearly every other action movie on the market, but they couldn’t.

2/10