Venom: The Last Dance is yet another low-level Marvel Spidey Spin-off that (possibly) sends off one of the most interesting and best performed characters with a shrug and a yawn. Neither of the previous films in the trilogy of Venom vehicles were ever particularly great, but they had some degree of knowing humour and an outstanding performance from Tom Hardy. Venom: The Last Dance still has Tom Hardy giving his all as symbiote infected journalist Eddie Brock, but it also has an air of carelessness and frustration. All returning parties – including returning writer turned director Kelly Marcel – make it appear like they’re absolutely over doing another one of these things, and resentful that they had to get caught up in a whole mess of multiverse shenanigans. That frustration is understandable, but when the decision is made to take that anger out on the viewer without giving them much in the way of entertainment value, Venom: The Last Dance becomes a welcome end to a wheezy franchise.
Eddie has been living incognito with the violent (but slightly goofy) monster inside him down in Mexico, on the run after he’s wrongfully accused in the murder of a San Francisco police officer (Stephen Graham). Eddie and Venom want to travel to New York City to settle some old scores and clear Brock’s name, but fate has other plans when a bunch of indestructible bug-like aliens known as symbiote hunters are sent to Earth to kill them on behalf of the long imprisoned creator of symbiotes. He’s looking for a “codex” that is visible to these creatures and functions as a sort of tracking device. It was formed when Venom saved the life of mortal Eddie, and the codex can be destroyed by killing either of them. With the “codex” destroyed, this evil dude can set about destroying the entire universe Thanos-style.
I hated typing out every word of that because no film this illogical, convenient, and numbingly stupid should have this much plotting; not just because “codex” means a type of book or manuscript and that’s a dumb name for a biological McGuffin. The first two Venom films – which Marcel and Hardy both had a hand in writing and shaping – were dumb, but also fun to certain degrees. Here, the character of Eddie Brock and his heavily hinted at send off seems to have been retrofitted not just to give Hardy an out, but also to provide the MCU with yet another big baddie bent on global domination. The first two Venom films had some implications on other properties, but they were always at arms length from the greater fray. They were dumb on their own terms. Here, everything Eddie Brock has gotten caught up in is dumb because the creatives are being forced seemingly against their will to fit everything into a box that has already been deemed structurally unsound by the thousands of cats already trying to live in it.
Hardy is still game as ever, with his interplay between Eddie and the alien inside his body still shining brighter than anything else in the movie. It’s hard to mask that Hardy seems burnt out on these characters, but Marcel gives the duo a lot more psychologically and philosophically interesting dialogue to work with, adding a pleasing layer of soulfulness to an otherwise draining dramatic experience. Hardy also gets some nice support from Rhys Ifans, Alanna Ubach, Dash McCloud, and Hala Finley as a quirky family who agree to give a stranded Eddie a ride to Las Vegas while they’re on a road trip to the soon to be decommissioned and demolished Area 51. These characters are so much fun to be around, one wishes this could’ve been a simpler sort of road movie through the desert instead.
But in bringing that up, that brings us to the REST of the plot that’s infecting all the fun in Venom: The Last Dance with a deadly boring virus. You see, Eddie is also being pursued and tracked by military man Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor, given nothing to do except look mean and shout a lot) who thinks all symbiotes should be eradicated. Rex is opposed by the kindly and sorta mysterious Dr. Payne (Juno Temple, smiling politely but kinda seeming confused), a scientist with a tragic backstory who has been studying symbiotic behaviours and believes they are coming to Earth because something a lot darker than they are is trying to break free. (Which, yeah, we know because there was a whole lengthy prologue off the top trying to explain this.) Ejiofor is tasked with making it seem like there are life and death stakes are unfolding, and Temple is there to supply exposition in the fashion of a cement mixer that has gone out of control. They’re great actors struggling with horrible characters and a bad story.
This entire thread, which seems to serve as a branching off point for things following Venom: The Last Dance, chews up a lot of screen time in the film’s first half, and all of it is aggressively boring and limp. During the interminable sequences with these characters, Hardy is nowhere to be found, meaning the one person who’s trying to keep things light and fun is miles away from the actual bulk of the story. The lore building here is aggressive and relentless for no reason except to keep the machine moving at all costs. If this is Hardy’s last turn, all of this doesn’t amount to much more than a commercial for other MCU offerings in the future. If he does come back, this is such a poorly plotted out bait and switch that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth going forward. It’s also extremely disingenuous for a film that boasts a character bad mouthing the multiverse early on in a winking nod to then back track and make the same mistakes.
The action in Venom: The Last Dance also doesn’t earn the project a lot of points. With the exception of a pair of nifty chase scenes – one unfolding during a trip down a swiftly moving river and the other involving Eddie and a motorcycle – Marcel struggles to find ways to organically give the viewer some degree of bombast. Everything is forced and inorganic from start to finish, with the big climactic clash between a bunch of symbiotes and those Starship Troopers knock off bug creatures devolving into a chaotically edited, visually unappealing mess after a promising start. Things pile up like a car crash, en route to an ending that will leave many viewers puzzled by just how little they get out of it. (And how much less they will get after sitting through the post-movie sequences, should they decide they want to sit through twelve or so minutes of credits.)
There are some laughs along the way and flashes of what made Hardy so special as the lead, but mostly the feelings that pervade are numbness and resignation. Venom: The Last Dance aimlessly shuffles around under the weight of franchise driving edicts and contractual obligation. It’s the type of movie where it would likely be more entertaining to watch a documentary about everything that went into the making of it than sitting down to view the final product. When Hardy is on screen, Venom: The Last Dance is a bad movie, but at least a palatable one. Whenever he’s not, it’s positively unbearable.
Venom: The Last Dance opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, October 25, 2024.
