Venom: The Last Dance review: a disappointing finale for Sony’s Spidey villain franchise

Venom: The Last Dance is a comic book movie in need of a real, present villain. The closest the film comes to that is Knull (Andy Serkis), a literal being of darkness whose relationship with the very symbiotes he created is one fueled by bitterness and a universe-destroying desire for revenge. But Knull is barely an active presence in Venom: The Last Dance — operating from afar for reasons that are made clear in the film’s clunky prologue and then repeated several more times. For the most part, he is a faceless villain whose actions are carried out by CGI monsters lacking even more of a personality than him.

The absence of a compelling threat wouldn’t be an issue if Venom: The Last Dance were just a wacky buddy comedy about its two leads, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his symbiote companion. But the film still wants to adhere to the rules of a traditional superhero movie, which means writer-director Kelly Marcel is forced to come up with increasingly convoluted ways for action and conflict to unfold. Without a villain like Venom: Let There Be Carnage‘s Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) around to organically provide that, The Last Dance is in turn forced to spend more time setting things in motion and moving its characters around like pieces on a chessboard than just sitting back and having fun.

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Venom: The Last Dance picks up almost immediately after the events of its 2021 predecessor. It finds Eddie and his symbiote second half still on the run following the events of Let There Be Carnage. The duo decides to head to New York and use a judge Eddie knows from his journalist days to clear his name, but their trip from Mexico to the Big Apple is interrupted by the arrival of a seemingly unkillable alien sent by Knull. The villain’s minion tracks the pair across America and prevents them from slipping past the watchful gaze of Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a U.S. military official tasked with hunting down and capturing every remaining symbiote organism on Earth.

Strickland’s mission to capture and contain Venom: The Last Dance‘s symbiotes becomes a source of friction between him and Dr. Teddy Payne (Ted Lasso star Juno Temple), an alien-obsessed scientist who would rather communicate with the aliens and take care of them than eliminate them. Payne’s backstory is revealed in a flashback that is laughably absurd and yet played completely straight by both Temple and Marcel, while Ejiofor’s Strickland never emerges as anything more than a cardboard cutout of every archetypically stern military official in movie history. These two characters aren’t interesting enough for Venom: The Last Dance to dedicate as much time to them as it does.

Strickland and Payne are included solely to provide The Last Dance with both more opportunities for explosive set pieces and the sci-fi backdrop for its extended climax. But nothing that they bring to the film is as worthwhile as the kind of screwball, zany antics that Venom and Eddie get up to in 2018’s Venom and Let There Be Carnage and yet are rarely given the time or space to indulge in more of this time around. It is, however, still in the rare instances when The Last Dance is content to simply let Hardy have more manic, sweaty fun onscreen as the increasingly irritable former journalist that the film is at its lightest and most enjoyable.

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The only one of the film’s secondary subplots that makes even close to a lasting impression is a run-in Eddie has with a vacationing family led by Martin Moon (Rhys Ifans), an extraterrestrial-obsessed hippie whose lifelong desire to visit Area 51 puts him unexpectedly in the paths of Eddie, Strickland, Payne, and Venom: The Last Dance‘s aliens. This thread works partly because of Ifans, whose shaggy performance helps inject The Last Dance with some of the same goofy energy that made the Venom franchise stand out in the first place. More than anything, though, it is the one subplot in a film that is seriously lacking a strong central storyline that manages to provide consistent laughs and entertaining moments.

There is also Hardy’s performance, which remains as charmingly bizarre as ever even in a film that frequently fails to recognize him as its greatest strength. Unfortunately, while Hardy himself seems just as in-on-the-joke as he’s always been, Venom: The Last Dance fails to strike the right balance between knowing absurdity and misplaced self-seriousness. The film is weighed down by its apparent finality and feels duty bound to bring Eddie and Venom’s friendship to an end in a way that honors it. The Last Dance, consequently, tries to tap into a strain of sentimentality that feels out of place and unearned in a franchise like this, which has mined a not-insignificant amount of its comedy from the immaturity of its central alien and his hunger for human heads.

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What you get at the end of all of these mistakes is a third Venom film that feels too chaotic, convoluted, and paper-thin even by its franchise’s standards. The Venom movies have never been — in the traditional sense of the phrase — “good,” but they have been a lot of fun in the past. The worst thing you can say about Venom: The Last Dance is that it is the least fun of its franchise’s installments. It is more obsessed with its plot than its characters, and so it sends the superhero genre’s oddest odd couple out on a note that is far too mawkish and straightforward than they — in all of their comical ridiculousness — deserve.

Venom: The Last Dance is now playing in theaters.