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Hardy and Serkis create Carnage

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (M, 97 mins) Directed by Andy Serkis Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★1⁄2

Afew years back, someone told me Andy Serkis had played the grizzly bear in The Revenant. And to the eternal credit of my mum, who raised me 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 Breathe 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 Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, which put him back in the world of performance-capture creatures, but also resuscitated the genre with a fresh take on the much-told stories.

So, I’d say, if you want a director who can locate the heart of characters who 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 Venom: Let There Be Carnage 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-some-stuff-he-did-in-between and basically disposable.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage 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 origin movie for them instead.

If you have seen 2018’s Venom, you will know that Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is possessed – or at least occupied – by an inky, alien ‘‘symbiote’’ with a wise-cracking sense of humour and taste for human brains, chicken and chocolate, in that order.

And that Brock and his E.T. lodger maintain an odd-couple relationship, while keeping the streets of San Francisco clear of muggers and worse.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage 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 Natural Born Killers 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 Harrelson’s life. I was happy – tiny spoiler – the last scenes of Let There Be Carnage at least hint we perhaps haven’t seen the last of Harris in this series.

Meanwhile, Michelle Williams continues to gamely make something out of nothing as Anne, Brock’s ex-fiancee.

The greatest strength of the 2018 film by far was Tom Hardy as Brock/Venom. Serkis plays on that relationship, sets up a mirror in Harrelson/Carnage – also to great comic effect – and, like the actor’s director he is, gets out of the way and lets his stars have a laugh with their characters. The results are loose, funny, and never outstay their welcome.

Let There Be Carnage is also the first Marvel movie of the current series to have you out of the theatre in under 100 minutes. I reckon that’s worth a star at least.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is now screening in select cinemas.

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2021-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

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