MOVIE: Venom – Let There Be Carnage (2021)

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage Year: 2021 Rating: PG-13 Length: 97 minutes / 1.61 hours A lot of critics of the superhero genre say these movies contain no substance. They claim that there's nothing in them other than quippy one-liners and hard-to-follow action. Most days, I might defend the superhero genre for its flashy set pieces or subtle character development. After seeing Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), I cannot hold the same defense against the critics here. It is unfortunate that such a good villain from the Spider-man franchise would be in such an awful movie. The first Venom (2018) movie was tolerable, if for the only reason that Spider-man 3 (2007) botched the casting of Eddie Brock so badly. Tom Hardy certainly has a better physique for the role, and the original Venom film had some fairly decent "buddy dialogue" between Brock and Venom that made it entertaining. Flash forward to the sequel, and these two characters need couples' therapy like nothing else....
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MOVIE: Capone (2020)

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Capone Year: 2020 Rating: R Length: 103 minutes / 1.72 hours To give you a sense of the quality of this movie, I received a copy to own Capone (2020) for free from Redbox. The fact that Redbox was the distributor for this movie should have been the first indication of how bad it was going to be. At first, I figured, "Oh, a movie about Al Capone. That should be interesting, right? And Tom Hardy is in it? He's done some great stuff." How wrong I was. Now it's my job to warn you about it. Perhaps the director, Josh Trank, was to blame for this mess of a movie. Sure, his first film, Chronicle (2012), was pretty good, but Fantastic Four (2015) showed this to be a fluke, and Capone put the last nail in the coffin for his career. I mean, how can you take such an interesting historical figure like Al Capone (Tom Hardy) and focus on all the wrong parts...
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MOVIE: Venom (2018)

by benmweilertNo Comments
Venom Year: 2018 Rating: PG-13 Length: 112 minutes / 1.87 hours If I haven’t said it before in my review of Spider-man: Homecoming (2017), I’ll repeat it here: I grew up watching the 1990s animated Spider-man series, which makes the Spider-man franchise one of my favorite. Consequently, most of my knowledge of the franchise comes from the show. In my mind, the symbiote storyline that introduced Venom was one of the best in the series, and I was disappointed when Spider-man 3 (2007) woefully miscast Eddie Brock with Topher Grace. Flash forward a decade later, and the big screen is taking another crack at the Venom storyline in a standalone film…but without Spider-man. As a long-time fan, I appreciated the mostly faithful origin story in Venom (2018), with a few minor and vital details still retained to make it close to what actually happened. This time around, Tom Hardy was a much better choice for the titular role, even if his mumbling accent was a little distracting at times. While the physique was a match,...
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