April | 2022 | ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES

Despite playing host to an alien symbiote, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is doing surprisingly well. He and Venom are getting along famously, exchanging zingers, bonding over their shared love of crimefighting, and just generally becoming best friends. Eddie then stumbles onto an opportunity to revive his stalled career as a journalist after serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) asks for Eddie to interview him before he is executed for his crimes. And that’s where Eddie’s day goes from “good” to “worst ever”.

Cletus, you see, is destined to become Carnage, who in the comics may be even more of an enemy to Venom than Venom’s first nemesis Spider-Man. Spider-Man is nowhere to be found in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe despite Tom Holland being credited on this film (don’t get your hopes up on that point, by the way), so it’s up to Carnage to be the prime antagonist for Venom in this film. Cletus quickly bonds with a piece of the Venom symbiote after Eddie interviews him, and together he and Carnage escape from death row without any trouble. It’s then up to Eddie and Venom together, a.k.a. the Lethal Protector, to stop Carnage before he and his true love Shriek (Naomie Harris) kill Eddie’s ex-girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams) and her new fiancé Dan (Reid Scott).

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a prime example of how hard it is for Hollywood to make a good sequel. The first Venom was surprisingly fun thanks entirely to Tom Hardy. Hardy fully embraced his symbiote pal and their banter was wonderful. All they had to do here was let Hardy repeat his performance from last time, which would have been great. In Let There Be Carnage, when Venom and Eddie are alone (together), the magic is still there. They are a joy to watch. Unfortunately, since this is a sequel, Sony crammed a whole bunch of new stuff into this film, like Cletus’ and Shriek’s back story, and none of it measures up to the scenes featuring Eddie and Venom. The worst thing is, since this movie did so well at the box office, the inevitable sequel will surely follow the same pattern as this one, adding even more villains and an even more convoluted plot, and no lessons will ever be learned.

Even though Eddie and Venom lose so much screen time to inferior material, there are still enough good scenes between them to make this a worthwhile watch for fans of the first film. However, this film should be a hard pass for anyone who disliked the first, and I’m sure everyone in this category knew that before reading this review. And if you haven’t seen either Venom film, watch the first and then wait to see if the third film ends up being better than the second.

The Batman is another fresh start for a DC superhero. This time around, Robert Pattinson dons the mask, taking the torch from Ben Affleck, who was originally set to star in and direct this movie until he stepped aside in 2017 as director. Eventually, after Matt Reeves took over as director, after Pattinson got COVID-19 while filming, and after getting pushed from its original release date like every other movie in the past two years, The Batman finally arrived in theatres in March 2022 and started streaming on HBO Max and Crave this week.

Pattinson’s (The) Batman is in year two of his crime-fighting experiment, a relatively young man who is still learning his trade alongside Jeffrey Wright’s Lieutenant Gordon. Batman is brought in by Gordon to help investigate the murder of Gotham’s mayor by the Riddler (Paul Dano), and quickly figures out that the mayor is just the first name of many on the killer’s list. The list’s last name is an unknown informant, and Batman, as he does, tries to solve the puzzle of the informant’s identity so he can save the city and stop the Riddler’s plan.

To help in his quest, Batman recruits Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz), who gives him access to Gotham’s seedy underbelly, located in a nightclub run by the Penguin (an unrecognizable Colin Farrell) and regularly attended by mobster Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). Selina fights with and against Batman as the situation requires and proves herself to be both a worthy Catwoman and the best sidekick that any live-action Batman movie has had so far.

The Batman also features a great Batmobile which fits Gotham’s aesthetic about as well as anything that Batman’s ever driven, proving its worth in an excellent chase across Gotham’s freeways. Despite the movie’s almost three hour runtime, none of Batman’s other vehicles made the cut this time, which is almost certainly for the best. There is a clear inverse relationship between the quality of any given Batman movie and the number of vehicles Batman uses.

Given The Batman’s tortured history, I wondered whether it would have been better for Warner Bros. to have scrapped it along with so many other DCEU titles that never made it to theatres. But this film quickly won me over. Pattinson is great as Batman and also surprisingly good as emo Bruce Wayne, Kravitz is a compelling partner and love interest, and Reeves gives us a Gotham that is dark, rainy and gritty most of the time, but splashed with just enough colour and familiar elements to feel like it could be full of real people. It’s a place I would like to visit again, and there are enough villains left standing at the end of The Batman to support three or four more entries in this series before the next inevitable reboot.