It’s become a running joke that whenever Kevin Smith offers his thoughts on a new movie or TV show that he’s watched, the first question on everyone’s lips is whether it made him cry or not. The View Askewniverse creator wears his heart on his sleeve, and he’s often reduced to a bubbling wreck by even the most trivial of projects.
At various points Smith has revealed that Bill & Ted Face the Music, the Season 1 finale of Marvel’s What If…?, Wonder Woman 1984 and even the trailer for Transformers spinoff Bumblebee had brought him to tears, but the same can’t be said of superhero sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
In a recent installment of his Fatman Beyond podcast, Smith shared his opinions on the box office behemoth, and his words largely echo the consensus shared by the fanbase.
“Here I’ll say this, Let There Be Carnage? I’d put a question mark at the end of that. Like, well, what does ‘Carnage’ say to you other than the character? Body count. I was actually surprised at the body count….He’s a serial killer before he gets a symbiote in him and sh*t, so you’re like, ‘Aw he turns his hand into a cleaver!’. In a world where, I’m not saying every movie has to be this, but what’s that Kingsman movie where they went in a church and f*cking slaughtered everybody?
It’s a pretty high bar for a comic book movie where you’re like ‘All right, Carnage could do this’, and he didn’t. He swung it, it was very, very cool, don’t get me wrong. Again, no complaints, but could you imagine him halving people? And you could get away with it in this movie, they got a real sense of humor about death and violence in this movie.”
Similar to the first film, Venom: Let There Be Carnage holds a much higher audience score on Rotten Tomatoes than it does a critical rating, with the target demographic loving the weird and wonderful comic book adaptation. Director Andy Serkis and star, producer and co-writer Tom Hardy made no bones that they made the movie for the fans first and foremost; Smith falls into that camp, so it’s no surprise he enjoyed the Marvel blockbuster for the exact same reasons as everybody else.
