The saga of Eddie Brock and Venom has ended, at least for now. Venom: The Last Dance concludes the Venom trilogy with a deeply weird, goofy, gooey, and surprisingly poignant conclusion. It may not have been an ending, or even a film, critics wanted from a franchise they’ve overwhelmingly derided from its initial offering, 2018’s Venom. But it’s an ending that knows exactly what it wants to be. And it is certainly an ending Tom Hardy has earned.
To be upfront, I adore the Venom movies. From leaning into the silliness of the ’90s comics, to its B-level monster movie trappings, to its insistence on breaking the superhero movie formula down with each entry, these films stand out in a superhero marketplace dominated by increasingly complicated lore.
Don’t get me wrong, those lore-heavy features can be great. But it’s refreshing to have films that don’t take themselves seriously and know exactly who their audience is. This isn’t to say that critics or audiences who don’t like these movies are wrong, or to insinuate the existence of some critics vs. fans nonsense. Film criticism is subjective as always, and when it comes to this particular movie and franchise, it’s a low-stakes game.
But the game being played is fascinating because its rules remain elastic. If making superhero movies is like a game of poker, meant to win the biggest pot possible, then the Venom movies are the equivalent of chipping in some Monopoly money, a Rolex and a few marbles just for fun. It’s not the expected pot, but it’s ultimately still worth something, even if it does upset that status quo.
Much of that sense of elasticity comes down to Hardy’s passion for the character and hands-on approach to the series’ direction. Sure, many actors are passionate about their roles as superheroes and supervillains, but Hardy signed on to play Venom because of his son’s love for the character, in an age where every rising star was approached to do a superhero film because it was the thing to do.
What could have easily been just a job for an Oscar-nominated actor of Hardy’s caliber, instead became a passion project, with Hardy bringing in a variety of influences, acting techniques, and his longtime friend and creative partner Kelly Marcel, who has written and produced each entry and directs the latest installment.
There’s a certain rejection of ego at play with Hardy in these films. He’s not afraid to be silly, to jump into a tank of live lobsters, get sprayed with ketchup, or get dragged through the desert, all while doing “a voice.” But an admirable quality about Hardy as a performer is his refusal to be boxed in.
Months after he delivered one of the year’s best performances as Johnny in American auteur Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, he can stumble around with one shoe and a voice in his head as Eddie Brock. Even more significantly, both characters, caught amid heartbreak over the lives they might’ve had and people they could’ve been, are handled with the same measure of love and sincerity by the actor.
The best scene in Venom: The Last Dance, the one that I keep returning to, isn’t an action sequence, but a quiet moment Eddie and Venom experience hitchhiking in a hippie family’s caravan where Eddie contemplates existentialism, legacy, and the people around him as the family’s rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” plays in the distant background. Venom says, “Sometimes I think we could have been happy with a life like this,” and minutes later, “You would’ve made a good dad, Eddie.” That is the perfect distillation of the franchise right there, for a character who craved normalcy and companionship and an actor whose role as a dad helped shape these films.
These Venom films, silly and critically unloved as they might be, aren’t simply a reflection of the comic character first made popular in Spider-Man comics, but of Hardy himself, and Venom: The Last Dance may be the purest expression of that. Hardy’s well-known love of dogs shapes the first major action sequence in Marcel’s film, as Venom takes down a gang of criminals behind a dog-fighting operation, freeing the dogs in the aftermath. Hardy’s Venom voice, as he recently told MTV, was largely inspired by his love for the hip-hop music he grew up listening to. Even the queer-coded relationship between Eddie and Venom feels like an extension of Hardy’s lens of acceptance and desire not to place people or art into boxes.
Some argue that the Venom franchise was IP-driven pursuit by Sony to capitalize on the rights to Spider-Man, but I’d argue that whatever the impetus was, they’ve proven to be far more creative and personal than some of the output from studios that fans worship. For all of the messiness, these Venom movies have become increasingly tied to the people making them, rather than the studios selling them.
We’re in an era of studios responding with haste to fan criticism. Don’t like the tone of this? We promise to do better in the next. Don’t like the casting for this character? We’ll see what we can do. Too woke? Well of course, we can’t publicly acknowledge it, but we’ll make sure any overt elements of wokeness are snuffed out.
It’s an age of fan demand and fan power when it comes to the majority of IP. Yet, Tom Hardy simply does not care about that stuff when it comes to Venom. He makes the films he wants, for the people he wants, with the people he wants, and if you’re on board great, if not oh well.
There was no concerted effort to make the films less silly. There was no concerted effort to adhere to the tone of more recent Venom comics, to push for an R-rating, or to make films in the effort of fan service and comic book accuracy. This strategy has proven to be a financially successful model and has garnered a global audience of Venom enthusiasts, which has worked well for Sony, more than any of the other entries in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe thus far.
There are certainly fans who care about studio profits and ownership rights. But what’s more valuable is the fact that we got this deeply weird, sometimes messy, surprisingly poignant, and outrageous superhero film trilogy that feels bonded to human desires.
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