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?

Whatever Fleischer was trying to do the first go around, director Andy Serkis (yes, that Andy Serkis) has perfected with his take on Sony’s odd-duck Venom property. Venom: Let There Be Carnage technically even checks all those same boxes that had me so off-put during the first film: the script is a potty-mouthed stream of consciousness, almost as if written by a 12-year old’s horny id; the performances are batty and completely over-the-top, particularly with the welcome addition of Woody Harrelson as serial killer Cletus Kasady; the score thrashes with angsty nu-metal headbangers; and yet it is singularly of a piece with itself.

There’s no attempt to be kinda gritty or somewhat serious to be found here. This is all nonsense, all the time, and everyone involved is finally on the same page as to how silly and stupid and fun this should be. Where Fleischer’s take wanted to have it both ways, Serkis’ is a top-to-bottom improvement that relishes like a pig in shit in the brash stupidity of it all.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage reimagines the dichotomy between washed-up reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his alien symbiote tag-along Venom as a knuckle-headed roommate comedy. It’s Beetlejuice meets The Odd Couple as Brock and Venom must learn to live together despite their differences. Those differences prove fairly severe as Venom essentially only wants to chew off people’s heads where Brock has instated a hardline “no murder” rule under his roof. Can’t we all just get along? I can’t underscore how silly and stupid it all is – and I openly snickered at the tail end of pretty much each and every scene – but the more dialed-in script form Kelly Marcel (Cruella) invites us to laugh along with how dumb the violent bromance of it all is.

Weighing in at a blissful 90-minutes, Venom: Let There Be Carnage drives towards an eventual showdown between Brock/Venom and Kasady/Carnage from the very first frame. I would almost venture to state that there isn’t a lot of fat on the script because Marcel basically just barrels towards the Venom vs. Carnage battle that everyone bought tickets to see but in reality, the film is all fat. It is a gaping maw of artificial entertainment without an ounce of pretense. One that accepts the notion that cinema is dead and proudly dances on its grave.

Venom may be empty cinematic calories and it will assuredly will make you a bit dumber for having watched it. And yet, here I am maybe, kinda defending this Limp Bizkit song of a movie because I think I genuinely enjoyed watching it, almost in spite of myself and my assumption that I would leave dazed and unamused. Perhaps this then is the cinematic equivalent of Surge – that repulsive/delicious highlighter-colored energy drink of the 90’s – a drink so bad for you it had to be removed from the market, but that almost made it all the more obnoxiously satisfying.

Plot-wise, there really is very little else. With the help of Venom, Brock helps crack where Kasady had stashed a whole bunch of corpses, thereby expediting his death sentence. Kasady gets mad, bites Brock, and laps up a taste of symbiote, becoming Carnage. He’s got a girlfriend, Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris), who has the ability to scream someone to death, and she coincidentally wants to kill another person closely tied to Brock. Michelle Williams appears as Anne, who has since left the unreliable Brock. There’s some set pieces and then they all do a battle. That’s it. That’s the movie.

Serkis taps into the gobbledegook main vein and almost makes all this noise and fury intelligible. He’s like a nincompoop whisperer, translating the ideas of a caffeine-rattled preteen onto the screen in user-friendly film grammar. Venom was an objectively bad movie and in many ways so too is Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Dostoyevsky mused, “”You have needs — satisfy them” and this is Serkis’ modus operandi: serve up the slop, let the piggies eat. At least he he ventures to make that slop as mindlessly appealing as possible. Don’t get things twisted though – there is nothing nutrient-rich in these venomous quarters. So let them eat cake.

CONCLUSION: Andy Serkis has turned the most ridiculous comic book property on the big screen into something more – dare I say – intelligible and entertaining with his full-throttle, witlessly fun/endlessly stupid sequel ‘Venom: Let There Be Carnage’. Harrelson proves a scenery-gobbling antagonist and Hardy is as committed to this utter nonsense as ever.