The second movie in Sony’s Venom universe brings back the scruffy journalist Eddie Brock and his symbiotic alien goo friend as they interview Cletus Kasady, a murderer from whom they expect to gain secrets.

Eddie is bitten by his subject, this transfers some blood tainted Venom into Kasady’s system. Being put to death by drugs stimulates the transferred Symbiote goo to create Carnage, a monster more powerful than Venom with an evil nature. Add in anger against a specific policeman and some alien daddy issues to then get an interesting villain origin.

All Kasady really seems to want is to marry his girlfriend, a girlfriend who has an unexplained Supersonic scream ability which clearly isn’t normal. Carnage causes chaos for policemen in the city, kidnaps Eddie’s friends which ends in a climactic battle in a church. Most of the movie just sees Eddie Brock and Venom falling out before making up because with the power of friendship (and symbiosis) they can beat the baddies.

The characters are really well done with great actors playing the hero and villain, they’re the right amount funny and creepy in playing their respective parts. It just felt like the movie never left the ideas stage, everything was thrown in and nothing was really explained. Let There Be Carnage has the foundation to be a really great movie but they never build on that so it’s just a mad jumble.

I liked the characters but that was all this movie really had as the plot was nonsense and there wasn’t enough action to make up for it.

They also ruined Venom for me by forcing inclusion of Tom Holland and the MCU in the post credit scene. Venom was good as a stand-alone and probably suits Garfield’s Spider-Man more.

Overall I’m disappointed. I prefer the first Venom movie as there’s some actual story there. This should have been a wild fight film where the audience should have been gripped by the challenges Venom faced, instead it was boring without the depth of story or enough crazy action to make it enjoyable.