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The Dumbest Superhero Franchise Out There is Back – and Much Improved – With ‘VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE’

In a superhero market defined by over-saturation, whatever the hell Sony is doing with Venom is entirely its own beast. The first installment from maligned director Ruben Fleischer was a wacky misfire that floundered critically but made piles of money, amassing nearly a billion dollars worldwide. My complaints with the 2018 clunker started with the childish script and spiraled all the way down through the weird performances, mismashed tone, off-putting direction, and juvenile needle drops. I ultimately flunked the film and dreaded its sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Much to my surprise, not only is this follow-up not an abomination but it’s actually pretty fun? Read More

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Out in Theaters: ‘VENOM’

An aimless, awful embarrassment for everyone involved, Venom imagines a world where a dopey Peter Parker-type was instead bitten by a radioactive turd. Creatively bankrupt filmmaking from top to bottom, Venom bows under the weight of an insufferable script, flat-out strange performances, and a mishmash tone that tries to levy the darkness of a character that waxes about snacking on eyeballs and fingers and  livers in with scatalogical jokes that truly only the prepubescent in the audience would giggle along with. Read More

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Out in Theaters: ‘ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD’ 

I’ll never quite understand the arbitrary changes tacked onto movies that are “Based on a True Story”, a trend that is particularly odd in All the Money in the World. This true-to-life horror story about J. Paul Getty and the dastardly kidnapping of his grandson focuses on Getty’s uncooperativeness in hostage negotiations but jumbles the real life numbers in order to gain what I must assume to be added dramatic mileage. It’s an odd lie (hence my paragraph-long nitpick), one that’s not fundamentally different from a teenage boy inflating how many women he’s slept with,  that’s effectively there to emphasize just how much a misery bastard the infamous “Richest Man in the History of the World” truly was. Read More