Venom: Let There Be Carnage Review – Shorter, Funnier, Wilder

🕷️ Introduction

🕸️ This review is part of our Sony Marvel Universe Hub – every Sony Spider-Man, Venom and Marvel film ranked and explained.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage opens with Eddie Brock trying to make scrambled eggs while Venom redesigns the apartment without permission and complains about the quality of the available human heads. It is the clearest possible statement of intent: this sequel has no interest in course-correcting toward something more conventionally competent. It has clocked exactly what made the first film work — the Eddie-Venom odd-couple dynamic — and it has decided to build an entire 97-minute film almost exclusively out of that, with Woody Harrelson playing the world’s most enthusiastic serial killer on the side.

This is not a great film. It is an extremely good time.

Ad

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray) (opens in a new tab)

The full sequel experience in 4K. Carnage's red symbiote visuals are exactly why HDR exists.

The difference between Let There Be Carnage and its predecessor is primarily one of confidence. Venom (2018) stumbled into its own identity — the buddy-comedy tone emerged as much through Tom Hardy’s improvisation as through deliberate writing. The sequel arrives knowing exactly what it is. There is no pretence here of a serious Spider-Man universe film. Andy Serkis, taking over from Ruben Fleischer, has made a film that functions basically as an extended sitcom episode about a man and his alien parasite having a very public falling-out, followed by the reconciliation that inevitably follows when a giant red monster threatens to destroy San Francisco.

At 97 minutes it is one of the shortest superhero films of the modern era, and it earns that brevity. Nothing is padded. Nothing is explained for longer than it needs to be. It has the energy of a film that trusts you to have seen the first one and is not going to waste your time recapping what you already know.

🤝 The Odd-Couple Fallout: Eddie and Venom’s Domestic Crisis

The first act of Let There Be Carnage is its best. Eddie has settled into an uneasy cohabitation with Venom — they share a body, a flat, and a deeply mismatched set of priorities. Eddie wants to rebuild his journalism career. Venom wants chocolate, lobsters, and the occasional criminal head. The tension has been building since the first film and the sequel has the wit to let it explode immediately.

The “breakup” sequence — Venom announcing he is leaving Eddie and attempting to experience San Francisco as an independent entity, briefly inhabiting a series of extremely surprised humans at a Halloween party — is the comedic highlight of the entire SSU. It is executed with a lightness and timing that suggests Serkis understood he was making a relationship comedy about a man and his parasite, and committed to that framing completely. Eddie, alone and losing his mind, is simultaneously pitiable and funny. Venom, temporarily free, discovers that the world without Eddie is bigger and lonelier than expected.

It is a better relationship arc than most conventional romantic comedies, which is a strange sentence to write about a Marvel-adjacent film featuring a giant alien that eats people, but here we are.

🔴 Cletus Kasady: Harrelson Cuts Loose

Woody Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady is the most enjoyable villain the SSU has produced. Where Riz Ahmed’s Carlton Drake in the first film was trying to play a serious antagonist in a film that had outgrown seriousness, Harrelson arrives on the same frequency as the material. He plays Kasady as a man who has decided that existing social norms are fundamentally boring and has reorganised his worldview accordingly. The performance is broad, theatrical, and completely appropriate.

The backstory — Kasady as a childhood outcast, the orphanage, the history with his love interest Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris, playing Shriek) — is handled with the minimum viable emotional investment, which is the correct amount. This is not a film interested in villain origin psychology. It is interested in giving Harrelson an opportunity to have an extremely good time, which he does, from the moment he ingests a piece of the Venom symbiote and Carnage begins to grow.

Carnage himself is a significant visual upgrade over Venom. The red symbiote is more fluid, more spider-like in its movement, and considerably more alarming when it moves at full speed. The Venom-Carnage relationship — Carnage is essentially Venom’s offspring, which Venom regards with a complicated mix of horror and parental instinct — adds a layer of genuine menace that the first film’s villain lacked entirely.

Ad

Venom & Carnage 2-Pack Action Figures (opens in a new tab)

The symbiote showdown in collectible form. A solid desk piece for anyone who wants both sides of the fight on their shelf.

The final battle between Venom and Carnage in a cathedral is spectacular chaos at the expected superhero budget level. It suffers from the same problem as the first film’s climax — two symbiotes fighting in the dark is inherently difficult to parse visually — but it moves fast enough that the visual noise becomes acceptable. The emotional resolution, such as it is, lands cleanly.

🕸️ Why the Post-Credits Scene Matters

The post-credits sequence in Let There Be Carnage is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most consequential stingers in the SSU. Eddie and Venom are transported through the multiverse and emerge in an unfamiliar hotel room with a television that is broadcasting J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons, reprising his MCU role) announcing Spider-Man’s secret identity as Peter Parker. Venom sees the screen, licks it, and says something quietly enthusiastic about wanting to eat Tom Holland.

The scene is brief, funny, and seismic. It confirmed what had been suspected: the SSU and MCU are connected via the multiverse, the same mechanism that No Way Home would explore a few months later when Venom himself appears briefly in the MCU timeline and leaves a small piece of the symbiote behind. The implications are considerable. A proper Venom-Spider-Man confrontation in a shared universe is now narratively possible. Whether Sony and Marvel ever make that film remains one of the franchise’s great open questions.

For the dad who has been watching this genre for twenty years: the post-credits scene in Let There Be Carnage is the moment the SSU stopped feeling like a parallel oddity and started feeling like a piece of something genuinely larger.

🎬 The SSU Context: Still No Spider-Man

A point worth making explicit: the SSU at this stage is still operating entirely without its most famous character. Peter Parker is in the MCU, making brilliant films under Marvel Studios. The SSU is building a supporting universe around his villains, which is a structurally unusual franchise decision that becomes more obvious the longer it continues.

This is not a creative failure — it is a licensing reality. The original Sony Spider-Man films (Raimi’s trilogy, the Amazing Spider-Man duology) all had Spidey himself. The SSU exists in the specific shape it does because that deal with Marvel left Sony with the surrounding characters but not the central one. Let There Be Carnage is a consequence of that architecture, and it is a better film than that architecture deserves.

Ad

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (Blu-ray) (opens in a new tab)

The reliable home-cinema edition. Stack it with Venom (2018) for the ideal double-bill night.

Is Venom: Let There Be Carnage worth watching?

Yes, especially if you enjoyed the first film. It is shorter, funnier, and more confident in its own skin. At 97 minutes it never outstays its welcome, the Eddie-Venom domestic comedy is a genuine improvement on the original, and the post-credits scene alone earns the watch. A comfortable 7 out of 10.

Who is Carnage and how does he relate to Venom?

Carnage is a symbiote bonded to Cletus Kasady, a serial killer Eddie Brock interviewed in prison. Kasady ingests a fragment of the Venom symbiote during a visit, which eventually produces Carnage: a red, more powerful and significantly less ethically conflicted symbiote. In the comics, the Venom-Carnage relationship is essentially parent and murderous offspring, and the film honours that dynamic with some dark comedy around Venom’s complicated feelings about the whole situation.

What happens in the Venom 2 post-credits scene?

Eddie Brock and Venom are transported through the multiverse into the MCU timeline, where they briefly watch a news broadcast featuring J. Jonah Jameson revealing Spider-Man’s identity as Peter Parker. The scene directly sets up Venom’s cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home and confirmed the SSU-MCU multiverse connection. It is one of the most consequential post-credits scenes in the Sony Marvel catalogue.

Do I need to watch Venom (2018) before Let There Be Carnage?

Yes. The sequel assumes you know the Eddie-Venom dynamic, the Cletus Kasady setup from the first film’s post-credits scene, and the core supporting characters. Watch in order: Venom (2018) first, then Let There Be Carnage (2021). At a combined runtime of around 210 minutes it is a solid double-bill.

Who directed Venom: Let There Be Carnage?

Andy Serkis, best known as the performance-capture pioneer behind Gollum in Lord of the Rings, Kong, and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes trilogy. His direction here is looser and more playful than Fleischer’s, and he leans hard into the comedy — which turns out to be the correct call for a sequel that knows its strength lies in the relationship, not the action.