Venom: Let There Be Carnage is even worse. This is an overloud, confused mess of a film. It wants to rub shoulders with the Deadpool sub - genre of superhero (Venom - superhero???) features, but it's seriously not in the race. (For the life of me, I still don't understand how the character can be seen as a superhero, when even in its downtime, it just appears to continue to destroy and damage stuff. Oh, wait on! That has to be funny, right?)

Deadpool is funny. Ryan Reynolds is a good comic actor. There is copious witty dialogue from all characters and plenty of tongue in cheek, cleverly - staged scenes and situations, enhanced by appropriate musical selections. Venom on the other hand, just continually flounders along. It's idea of humour is to make a lot of noise, introduce massive amounts of CGI among lightning edits, smash up props and locations in a 3 Stooges type fashion and hope that its intended audience will find it hilarious. Here's the sad news folks. This punter found it just plain boring and really annoying on the ears. (In the first half of the film especially I began to dread the interplayed scenes between Venom and his host Eddie, because of them both continually screaming at one another. This was apparently done to emphasise the conflict between both characters, but there was little subtlety and like just about everything in VLTBC, was overplayed massively.)

Supporting actors like Michelle Williams and Naomi Harris pop in and out, but they have little to do and are so lightly sketched, they almost appear invisible. And the action scenes? Ho - hum! If you're into cartoons, you may be drawn to them. For me, tedious is the only adjective that may suffice. I just can't get my head around the fact that studios and production companies continue to pour big money into this sort of rubbish.