When Serkis is let loose, Carnage can only result

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (M, 97mins)

Directed by Andy Serkis Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★ 1⁄

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Afew years back, someone told me Andy Serkis had played the grizzly bear in

And to the eternal credit of my mum, who raisedme to be a trusting and simple soul, for a few minutes, I nearly believed them.

The thing is, down here in New Zealand, we know Serkis mostly as the shapeshifting actor with the elasticated vocal chords who can be Gollum one year and King bloody Kong the next.

We tend to forget though that Serkis, given a decent script and a tailwind, is also a fine director. Of action and effects of course – all those years at Miramar clearly taught him some wonderful tricks – but also of actors.

Serkis’ feature debut

was an unexpected, unflashy and basically terrific biopic of Robin Cavendish, who in 1928 was paralysed by polio and given only months to live, but who battled on to become an inventor of devices to help the disabled.

Serkis followed that with the good which put him back in theworld of performance-capture creatures, but also resuscitated the genre with a fresh take on themuch-told stories.

So, I’d say, if you want a director who can locate the heart of characterswho are as much CGI as flesh – and also keep the saccharine and sentiment away from a yarn about people inheriting strange new powers – then Serkis is worth a flutter. And

is the proof.

Sequels to superhero origin movies are tough to get right. The interesting part of the story is behind us, and the crisis that might spell the end of a trilogy is ahead. So part two is too often and-here’s-somestuff-he-did-in-between and basically disposable.

gets around this by giving itself a hell of a new villain or two to play with, and then devoting a decent chunk of its running time to being an originmovie for them instead.

If you have seen 2018’s you will know that Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is possessed – or at least occupied – by an inky, alien ‘‘symbiote’’ with awise-cracking

introduces another symbiote to the party and has him/it/them grow inside the welcome addition of Woody Harrelson, here playing a villain named Carnage, mostly by channelling his

persona from damn-near 30 years ago.

Accompanying Harrelson on his spree is a slightly underused and underwritten Naomie Harris as the villain Shriek, and the love of