Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

When Venom came out in 2018, I remember the world freaking out. Was it good? Could a bad movie make that much money? With its late-90s vibe and gleefully cheesy mentality, was Venom the future of superhero movies? I vividly remember insisting, “Venom is fine.” It certainly wasn’t worth the consternation into which so many comics fans lathered themselves. (Then again, nothing usually is.)

On the other hand, its sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, is not fine. It’s dire. It’s nearly unwatchable. Its only saving grace is that it’s only ninety minutes long, and you will want to run to the nearest comic book to cleanse your palate.

 

Possessed by the man-eating alien symbiote Venom, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) has found himself the only reporter to whom serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) will make his confessions. Kasady’s time on death row is short-lived, though, once he too becomes infected with a symbiote that transforms him into the murderous Carnage. While Carnage scampers off to free his equally homicidal lover Shriek (Naomie Harris), Eddie must mend his fractured relationship with Venom before San Francisco burns.

 

Somehow, at 97 minutes, Let There Be Carnage still feels like it’s too long. The plot meanders and dithers until Kasady becomes Carnage, as though we need ample exposition to make us believe that Woody Harrelson is playing a crazy person. Between his manic eyes and the insane red wig he was sporting in the previous film’s mid-credits scene (a bonkers creative decision that is, alas, ignored in this film), I don’t think we need to wait more than thirty minutes before Kasady transforms into Carnage, especially when the film is already this brief. The showdown between these two characters, which ought to be a hallmark feature of the film, is limited to the climactic third-act setpiece. Compare to the comics, which made Carnage the star of a 14-issue crossover series, “Maximum Carnage.” For a villain this iconic, with a performer as significant as Harrelson, it seems almost a waste not to use him more.

 

The film is, like its twin protagonist and antagonist, bifurcated between identities. On the one hand, it is a superhero sequel in which the stakes are raised with a high-profile villain from the comics. On the other hand, Let There Be Carnage may as well be a CGI remake of The Odd Couple, in which Tom Hardy is forced to share an apartment with his own gooey anthropomorphized voice. You might charitably view this as a satirical riff on the standard sequel, in which the superhero wrestles with his chosen path and contemplates abandoning the heroic path (cf., Spider-Man 2). But it’s hard to be charitable to a movie in which Tom Hardy is keeping live chickens in his apartment to stop himself from cannibalizing muggers and hobos. At every turn, there are glimmers of a less deranged film, but time after time Venom takes the manic path. If you’re a filmgoer who likes the volume at eleven, though, perhaps Let There Be Carnage is the Venom for you.

 

Throughout Let There Be Carnage, one thing is abundantly clear – everyone who made the film was clearly having a ball, serving up plate after plate of ham. Indeed, some of this fun must have come from the fact that, yes, the studio let them make a movie so unhinged, so eccentric. It’s the sort of blank check creative recklessness that comes with recouping eight times your budget, but the first film was already abundantly nutty; Let There Be Carnage is like giving cotton candy to a caffeinated toddler at a theme park’s last call. And I’m sure there are moviegoers for whom this is the perfect flavor of superhero movie, madcap and ludicrous. To them I say, God bless. I look at this film, having forgotten what I actually liked about the first Venom, and I realize that Let There Be Carnage is simply not on my wavelength. It is difficult even to recognize it as residing on the same planet as I do. 

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, some strong language, disturbing material and suggestive references.” Directed by Andy Serkis. Written by Tom Hardy and Kelly Marcel. Starring Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Naomie Harris, Reid Scott, Stephen Graham, and Woody Harrelson.

Jungle Cruise (2021)

If you were to take a blend of things that I specifically enjoy – Humphrey Bogart, movies based on theme park rides, The Mummy, dad jokes, Pirates of the Caribbean – you might end up with a movie like Jungle Cruise. However, in this case, the sum of the parts is so much more than the whole, with a film that ends up feeling noted to death and assembled by committee. Jungle Cruise is never quite terrible, but it docks somewhere south of watchable.

In search of a mythical flower that will end human suffering, Dr. Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) defies contemporary skepticism and commissions the sardonic skipper Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson) to ferry her and her brother (Jack Whitehall) up the Amazon River. Along the way, the trio is pursued by a cursed Spanish conquistador (Édgar Ramirez), a maniacal German prince (Jesse Plemons), and a harbormaster (Paul Giamatti) to whom Frank is deeply in debt.

 

At some point in Jungle Cruise – and this moment will vary for moviegoers – you’ll be reminded of a better movie that you’d rather be watching. Perhaps it’s early on, when the film’s opening flashback sequence and initial historical setting remind you of the structure of Stephen Sommers’s masterful Mummy. Perhaps you’ll pick up on the Bogart-esque performance of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (which is actually somewhat decent, inflected as it is by, above all, The African Queen). Or perhaps it’s the film’s second half, with cursed zombie conquistadors who seem airlifted from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Or maybe, just maybe, you’ll find yourself recognizing some of Frank Wolff’s deliberately bad jokes and wish that you were on the Jungle Cruise ride proper. At any rate, it is impossible to watch Jungle Cruise and think this is the best version of any of its disparate parts. 

 

Despite drawing on such a wealth of source material and creative influences, Jungle Cruise all too often feels like it’s pulling its punches. The key, for example, to why the corny jokes work so well on the ride is because the skippers believe in the punchline and deliver it with a knowing wink. Here, Johnson seems to want to remain above the jokes, delivering them deadpan but almost begrudgingly, knowing yet not really caring that some true believers want to hear about “the backside of water.” Ditto the winks to Albert Falls and Trader Sam, legendary figures in Disney Parks lore but almost inconsequential easter eggs here. Where Johnson cuts a passable Bogart for about half the film, Emily Blunt is a disappointing remix of Rachel Weisz’s Evelyn Carnahan from The Mummy, lacking the charm and wit in favor of a corporately cynical “girlboss” attitude. And as seriously as the film takes itself, it’s continually deflated by the fact that no one can pronounce the Spanish word “lágrimas” correctly. (It’s got an accent mark for a reason.)

 

While the first half of the film is essentially a theme park remake of The African Queen, peppered with enough inside references to keep fans from walking out, the second half is a disappointing retread of the Pirates movies. Édgar Ramirez and his crew of conquistadors seem airlifted from the disparate ghost zombie crews of Hector Barbossa, Davy Jones, and Armando Salazar. Some of these phantasms are merged with plant life, others with insects or snakes, to the point where they may as well be leftover CGI creations that weren’t used in the final cuts of the Pirates films. I don’t know quite how you make a narrative film out of a plotless ride like Jungle Cruise – perhaps focusing more on the Jungle Navigation Co. or on Albert Awol (if you know, you know) – but I don’t think that cribbing the successful Pirates formula is the most satisfying way to go.

 

If the plot feels like it’s grafted together from impressions of its predecessors, the cast certainly all feel like they’re starring in different movies. Johnson is somewhat slick but never quite breaks free of his own star persona; if he’d committed to the Bogart of it all, or embraced the hammy humor, it could have been a breakout franchise performer like Johnny Depp’s impossibly popular Captain Jack Sparrow. Blunt too seems bored by most of the film, trying not to overdo the stuffy bluster but never quite landing anywhere. Then there are the three strangest performances in the film – Jack Whitehall as Lily’s brother, Jesse Plemons as Prince Joachim of Prussia (a real person, mind you), and Paul Giamatti as a dock owner who seems to have wandered in from a Saturday Night Live skit. Whitehall plays MacGregor extremely broadly, accessing a Forrest Gump level of caricature, even as the film only winks and nods in the direction of his sexuality. Plemons is clearly having arch fun as a Germanic villain, but he’s so transcendently unreal that one loses focus on the film every time he appears. (This performance was but an appetizer for the sheer historical stupidity on display later that year in The King’s Man.)

 

Then there’s Paul Giamatti, who seems to understand how silly the film is and so brings the right level of ham to his performance. Yet no one else in the film is operating at his level, which makes him look more like a cartoon character than the computer-generated jaguar that prowls around the film. Particularly as a gifted character performer in the vein of, say, the Universal monster films, Giamatti shines a light on just how incongruous Jungle Cruise manages to be, a collection of parts and bits from five different writers who never seem to be on the same page. Indeed, just about the only thing in the movie that works is a mid-film twist that I genuinely did not see coming, yet this shift in the plot ends up veering the film into another strange and unexpected direction. Perhaps Jungle Cruise is like the Amazon River itself, swirling and winding in unpredictable ways, with too many voices arguing over how best to navigate it. 

 

Jungle Cruise is rated PG-13 for “sequences of adventure violence.” Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Written by Michael Green, Glenn Ficarra, John Requa, John Norville, and Josh Goldstein. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Édgar Ramirez, Jack Whitehall, Jesse Plemons, and Paul Giamatti.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

The Matrix franchise is in a weird place, historically speaking. The 1999 original is an unquestionably seismic event in pop culture writ large, and as a film it holds up. Its sequels are almost universally reviled (albeit undergoing a bit of a reexamination), while its expanded universe has been nigh forgotten. And so it was that we were all a bit surprised that original director Lana Wachowski announced she’d be returning to the franchise, without sister Lilly but with returning stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. Did we need this, we asked, and would it be any good?

For my part, I found The Matrix Resurrections to be fantastic, almost as good as the original despite playing an entirely different game in a creative sandbox I didn’t realize had much more to say.

 

Video game designer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) has the suspicion that his world is not real. When his boss (Jonathan Groff) insists that Mr. Anderson revisit his most famous creation, a trilogy of games called “The Matrix,” the déjà vu starts hitting pretty intensely. There’s Tiffany (Carrie-Anne Moss), the woman at the coffee shop to whom he feels inexplicably drawn; the colorful Bugs (Jessica Henwick), who insists she knows Mr. Anderson as the savior Neo; and a dapper man in sunglasses (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who looks and acts a great deal like Morpheus, one of the characters from the “Matrix” games. 

 

I’m being a little bit vague about the plot of the film because I think The Matrix Resurrections works best when you allow it to unfold itself like a puzzle box. Embrace the cognitive dissonance, ride the wave, and let the story play itself out. Put another way, no one should explain The Matrix Resurrections to you, but you should experience it for yourself. From the earliest trailers, fans were starting to piece together some of what the film might be about, but we only scratched the surface of the plot. Underneath the literal level of things that happen in the film, there is a wealth of self-aware and recursive subtext, somehow managing to reenact the original film while commenting on it and doing something different.

 

As before, the film is a kind of “awakening” story, and once again Wachowski has managed to put the audience right next to Neo as he discovers the truth about the world around him. We too are just as disoriented as Neo; we’ve seen The Matrix and its sequels, and we know that there are characters in this film who are supposed to be dead, while others are wearing new faces. Lines of dialogue, visual motifs, and even musical cues recur in unexpected ways, to say nothing of the intrusive but compelling smash cuts of archival footage from the original films. Like a two-hour mainline dose of mystery, The Matrix Resurrections keeps you engaged and guessing without losing sight of the emotional relationship that holds these characters – and this universe, this franchise – together. It’s the bond between these characters, Wachowski argues, not the sci-fi trappings or the kung fu action, that makes The Matrix what it is. It’d be overly on-the-nose if it weren’t so effective.

 

Of course, I’m a big fan of successful puzzle box movies like this one, so it really strikes a chord for me. I understand it may not land as well for someone expecting more of, say, the innovative bullet time sequences or the note-perfect freeway chase setpiece of The Matrix Reloaded. But that again is sort of the point of the film; having done those films already, Wachowski and her characters are doing something new, living a new life in something that both is and is not the Matrix we remember. From a certain vantage point, the action sequences are unfulfilling and unsuccessful, failing to push the boundaries of choreography and special effects the way the originals did. However, I don’t think Wachowski is as interested in those aspects of her story, just as her characters are equally keen to avoid them.

 

Though twenty years have passed since The Matrix Revolutions, Reeves and Moss slip into their roles with grace and precision. While they are getting back into themselves as characters, the audience never feels as though these aren’t Neo and Trinity. Keanu Reeves has been achieving a Neeson-in-Taken level of success in headlining the John Wick films, but here he truly reminds you that Neo was the role he was born to play; meanwhile Moss is so compelling that you’ll wonder why she hasn’t been a bigger star post-Matrix. I can’t say too much about the new stars without getting into spoiler territory, but I will note that Neil Patrick Harris is a real scene-stealer as Thomas Anderson’s therapist, helping him come to terms with his failing grasp on reality. Harris is a kind of update on one of the original trilogy’s most thankless roles, but with his blue glasses and air of legitimate concern, Harris’s analyst makes one of the strongest arguments for more of these films. 

 

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the end of Matrix Resurrections seems to be a collision of the endings of the last three films; there’s an impossible feat or two, a monologue from a program about the future, and the promise of a new tomorrow. Lana Wachowski has expressed no interest in a fifth or sixth Matrix film, though one imagines Warner Bros. would like to see at least one more. (Indeed, one of the film’s best gags is when Thomas Anderson learns that his Matrix video game sequel is being commissioned by his parent company, Warner Bros. itself.) If there’s more, I am just as surprised as you are to want it. But The Matrix Resurrections is – for lack of a more colorful descriptor – really, really good. It’s better than I expected, and it turns out to have been exactly what I wanted from a legacy sequel.

 

The Matrix Resurrections is rated R for “violence and some language.” Directed by Lana Wachowski. Written by Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, and Aleksandar Hemon. Starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jessica Henwick, Jonathan Groff, and Neil Patrick Harris. 

The King's Man (2021)

Matthew Vaughn knows he doesn’t need to keep making Kingsman movies, right? The original Kingsman film, The Secret Service, was a breath of fresh air (and a welcome bit of counterprogramming for those of us who didn’t want to see 50 Shades of Gray for Valentine’s Day 2015). The Golden Circle, however, was somewhat inert as a sequel, cringingly gross and overly enamored of itself. Fortunately, The King’s Man is a sight better than The Golden Circle, but it is dizzy and daft in a way that does it no favors.

The pacifist Orlando, Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), wants nothing more than to keep his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) out of the military, but the rising tides of the First World War conspire against them. Orlando and his servants (Gemma Arterton, Djimon Hounsou) form an ad hoc intelligence agency with Conrad to root out a conspiracy that includes the likes of Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), Mata Hari (Valerie Pachner), and Vladimir Lenin (August Diehl).

 

It’s worth remembering, after seven years and three films, that this all began as an adaptation of a 2012 comic book by Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen). I haven’t read the original comic in some years now, but my recollection was that it’s a fine soft send-up of the James Bond formula. However, as I was watching The King’s Man, I was thinking of another comic book I’d been reading earlier that day – Bill Willingham’s Fables, which imagines (in the tradition of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) what would happen if all the fairy tales were true, their characters all inhabiting the same universe. And this is exactly the conceit of The King’s Man; with so many larger-than-life historical figures running around between 1914 and 1918, what if they all knew each other? What if most of them were in an international ring of espionage together?

 

When it’s done with fictional characters, it opens up a new world of possibilities, but there’s something discomfiting when it’s a constellation of real historical figures. Perhaps it’s a failing of my own imagination, but I think it’s also true that The King’s Man mucks about with very recent history in transparent and unfulfilling ways. Ultimately, it’s a failing of the film not to do something interesting with this reckless historiography. (See instead, for example, Inglourious Basterds.) If I’m spending time trying to remember my college survey courses in history, the film isn’t working.

 

Apologies to Ralph Fiennes, who is plainly better than anything the screenplay gives him to do. He works the dialogue like a prestige World War I film, and he navigates the action sequences like something out of a Daniel Craig 007 flick. It’s when the film channels its Bond DNA that The King’s Man really sings, as in a third-act confrontation atop a mountainous plateau. The franchise seems to have jettisoned the gross-out laddish humor of The Golden Circle, and it’s for the best, yet the Bond-ier sequences remind the audience just how good The Secret Service was, and why. 

 

As the film wound down its James Bond denouement, I found myself wishing more of the film had been like that, more Spy Who Loved Me and not alternate history. As it stands, The King’s Man is very episodic, which works somewhat in its favor; if you’re not enjoying the plot, so the old saying might go, stick around for twenty minutes until it changes. But consequently the film’s big claim that it all matters because it’s all interconnected – right up to a big bad reveal that’s a bit obvious even if you don’t recognize a certain actor’s voice – falls flat when it doesn’t quite feel like a united whole. Instead, The King’s Man is a collection of bits, some better and some worse, that never exactly add up to something grander.

 

Then there’s the matter of the postcredits scene, which promises/threatens that the historical muckraking will continue, with a particular bygone villain who is so baldly obvious that it might better have been left to a satire of The King’s Man. Indeed, so outlandish is the moment when two prominent historical figures shake hands and conspire toward The King’s Man II that one can only assume from the deadly straight-faced presentation that the filmmakers know how patently silly it is. We can also hope that they know better. The King’s Man is fun but not fun enough, and I think it is high time that Matthew Vaughn move on to something else.

 

The King’s Man is rated R for “sequences of strong/bloody violence, language, and some sexual material.” Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Written by Matthew Vaughn and Karl Gajdusek. Based on the comics by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, Tom Hollander, Harris Dickinson, and Djimon Hounsou.