Venom: Let There Be Carnage (a movie review post)

 

I suppose I forgot how much I enjoyed the first Venom movie. I know I have because I went back an read my review and it expresses a degree of appreciation greater than what I remember, which means I should probably re-watch it. Part of the problem is that I have no great liking for Tom Hardy, except, I guess, as Venom, because I clearly enjoyed him in the first movie, and I did again in this one. He is quite good as Eddie Brock.

Still, I was going to skip this one until it "came out on DVD" (LOL), because I had no one to go see it with, BUT my son (the younger one) found out that the post-movie clip ties into the MCU and, so, he wanted to go see it (even though he has not seen the first one). I'm glad I didn't skip it. The relationship between Eddie and Venom is, for lack of a better way to express it, fun. My son laughed all through the first half of the movie.

My impression, without going back and re-watching the first one, is that this one is better. Don't take my word for it.

I do have one complaint... Look, it's me; what do you expect?

This is not exactly about the movie...
I mean, it is, but...

It's Woody Harrelson, okay? I like Harrelson. A lot. And he is really good in the role. Seriously, he is. BUT! But...Look, Harrelson is at least a decade older than me, and they have him playing a guy who is supposed to be in his 20s. And, hey, they do a great job with the makeup. Most of the time, it works but, every once in a while, during a closeup, you can just see his age. And, then, it doesn't work. It feels kind of weird, actually. I feel like Sony could have found someone of an appropriate age to play the part. It's not like Harrelson is any extra draw for this movie. They're not fooling some Boomer into going to see a Venom movie just because Harrelson is in it.

I guess it's a small complaint. It's just... weird.

Michelle Williams may be better in this one? I don't know. She's so generic to me, I feel like she could be anyone. Don't get me wrong, she's fine in the movie. There's not a lot for her to do to allow her to show any real acting talent. Reid what's-his-name, who I think of as Dan-from-Veep who also plays Dan in this movie, has more room to show off. And I like him pretty well.

Look, the movie is really about Venom and the relationship between Venom and Brock, and it completely succeeds at that. The conflict with Carnage is mostly secondary. Oh, which brings me to the only other issue I have with the movie: it's presented as a given that Carnage would want to kill his "father." Why? There's no reason given. Carnage is born and immediately wants to do away with "daddy." No one bothers to wonder why, not even, or especially, Venom. So maybe this is how it is on the symbiote planet? That seems like it would make it difficult to have any kind of society. But it's never addressed, and that one thing is kind of nagging at me.

That said, it's a fun movie. If you don't mind the plethora of dead bodies because, yeah, Carnage lives up to his name. It's not gory, though, or anything like that, but it's clear that Carnage is leaving a trail... um... that's not a big enough word... a freeway of bodies behind him as he goes. He kills everyone. So... fun? Look, they don't show the bodies, okay. That would be horrific. As it is, it's fun.

And, yes, the post-movie clip does promise, in a sense, a Venom/Spider-Man meeting. Evidently not in the next Spider-Man movie, though. It will be interesting to see what Marvel does with Venom as an import rather than re-creating him.

Oh, I suppose I failed to mention Shriek. She feels mostly like a MacGuffin. Which is kind of weird, I suppose, to say about a character, but she's really insignificant to the actual plot. I guess she needed to be there because she's in the "Maximum Carnage" storyline in the comics and to give Cletus some direction. -shrug- She's fine; she just feels superfluous.

Look, ignore all the negative stuff I said. It makes it sound worse than it is, because it's not worse at all. I actually wish I could sit down and watch both of them back-to-back, right now, but I guess I will have to wait to do that.

Logan (a movie review post)

Relatively speaking, I was an early adopter when it comes to Wolverine. I was already following him as a character when his original limited series came out in 1982, and I would be lying to say that he was not one of my main reasons for following the X-Men through the 80s. Well, Wolverine along with the writing of Chris Claremont, unarguably one of the best comic book writers ever. Ironically, Claremont didn't care for Wolverine as a character and almost dropped him completely from the X-Men lineup in the late 70s. It was John Byrne who saved the character out of a fondness for a fellow Canadian.

That said, it's been 15 years since the last time I read any Wolverine (or any comics at all, really, other than a few here or there that one or more of my kids might have had lying around), that being Origin,

a story I didn't much care for overall. It suffers from many of the same problems as Logan, those being trying to fill in details around a character to achieve a particular goal even when those details don't really fit with the character that has been created.

Mostly, though, what Logan proves is that Fox is no more capable of creating a cohesive continuity for their super hero films than Warner Brothers. It's sort of like having your tea bag break in your cup of tea. If you're careful and drink slowly, you can manage to mostly keep the tea leaves out of your mouth... until you get to that point where you have to throw the last quarter of it out because the leaves are too dense. Until that point, though, the tea is enjoyable as long as you keep it to small doses.

So, yes, Logan is a mostly enjoyable film. It accomplishes the one thing I'm sure all Wolverine fans have been waiting to see: Wolverine really cutting loose with his claws without the need of keeping the bloodshed to a PG-13 rating. And cut loose he does: arms, legs, and heads. That alone is probably worth the movie for the true fans.

The aspect of the movie I found most interesting was the question raised about mutants and their powers when they get old. Of course, the movie only works around the question without ever really addressing it, but we do get to see some of the effects in the aged Charles Xavier as he struggles to maintain control over his mental abilities.

Stephen Merchant as Caliban was a pleasant surprise. I like Merchant, and he was perfect in this role. Dafne Keen was also great. She has a brooding stare which is easily the match of Jackman's.

However, the movie is utterly predictable, wasting a perfect opportunity to do something above and beyond that was afforded it by  the success of Deadpool, probably the only super hero movie Fox has nailed since X-Men 2 in 2003. That said, considering that Jackman is not returning to the claws again after this movie (unless Ryan Reynolds does somehow convince Jackman to do that Deadpool/Wolverine team-up movie), Logan is a good send off. Good enough, at any rate.

But it could it have been better if only Marvel had done it, which is the thought I have after every one of the X-Men movies since the advent of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) with Iron Man back in 2008. Sony wised up and went to Marvel to get Spider-Man on the right track; maybe there's hope that Fox will do the same.