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

3. The Choppy Editing & Frantic Pacing

There was much alarm online when it was announced that Let There Be Carnage clocked in at just 97 minutes, especially in a climate where audiences seemingly need a huge-scale blockbuster to actually drag them out to the cinema.

While it's certainly refreshing to see a superhero tentpole that isn't 140 minutes long, it's also absolutely fair to say that the Venom sequel feels aggressively hacked to pieces during post-production.

A tightly packed 97-minute movie might sound great, but when you take away the credits, this thing is only around 85 minutes long, and evidently struggles to set up and pay off its various arcs in that timeframe.

The result is an editorially jumbled film that leaps from moment to moment with a breathless, exhausting expediency. Basically nothing is actually allowed to breathe, perhaps suggesting that studio intervention resulted in material being cleaved away.

It's tough to imagine Serkis willingly delivering such a choppy end product, but on the flip side, it at least respects your precious, precious time.