Venom: Let There Be Carnage Review - 5 Ups & 5 Downs

Downs...

5. Carnage Gets Totally Neutered

Even for those who didn't much care for the first film, its mid-credits tease at least roused a sliver of interest in seeing the sequel, where Eddie Brock/Venom (Hardy) takes on escaped serial killer Cletus Kasady aka Carnage (Woody Harrelson).

Though Harrelson is well-cast in the part, the character as presented is egregiously cleaned up compared to the source material, just as Venom himself is.

To accommodate the PG-13 rating, Kasady's savagery has been toned way down, the pile of bodies that landed him in prison only briefly touched upon at all.

The decision to focus his motivation away from pure bloodlust towards a desire to be reunited with his lover Frances Barrison aka Shriek (Naomie Harris) further feels like an attempt to plane the edges off the character and make him more palatable to general audiences - that is, children.

This is without getting into the extremely silly means through which Cletus becomes infected with the symbiote in the first place, and the film's divisive assertion that the pair aren't a truly symbiotic match.

Given the enormous, awesome potential to see Carnage finally done justice in live-action form, even with a PG-13 rating, this feels like a wildly missed opportunity in the pursuit of a more palatable, sanitised product.