Metacritic reviews

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a bold and brisk superhero story, unlike any other mainstream Hollywood film in the genre. It crams a heck of a lot of movie into an hour and a half, but it doesn’t feel like it needed to be longer. It just feels like we need more movies like it.

Taking itself less seriously and having more fun, its relatively short runtime is packed densely with plenty of action, character development, and campy humor. At the same time, it’s a love story about relationships evolving and learning to grow and trust each other.

The results are deeply, charmingly dumb, especially the extended focus on the tete-a-tete between our tic-heavy underdog and his murderous companion.

It’s hard to overstate just how much the relative success of this film comes down to Hardy and his go for broke performances as Eddie and Venom.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is at its best — and its most unique, amusing, and fresh — when it’s tossing out those expectations and letting its freak flag fly. There doesn’t need to be carnage (or, hell, even Carnage), there just needs to be Venom, and more of it.

If we're all disposable space chum in this franchise game anyway, who needs a coherent narrative and character arcs? Just bite the head off every chicken, and lean in.

It’s a faster, wilder ride—and a choppier one, even as it moves primarily in circles.

The title isn’t only a promise of so much destruction to come, but also inadvertently an assurance that its most action-packed sequences will be defined by loudness, incoherence, and pointless cruelty.

It’s at least a short film, clocking it at around 90 minutes, Serkis chopping off any extraneous fat, but it floats by and floats on without ever causing us to sit up and pay attention. Let there be no more.

Hardy’s use-it-or-lose-it charm very nearly drowns out the dreadfulness all around him, but ultimately it’s not enough to sustain life. And given that the actor has a “story by” credit here, he deserves more blame than praise.