By far the best thing about the “Venom” movies is that Venom is in them. Venom should be in all movies, but — to my great chagrin — he is almost exclusively in these ones, and so we have no choice but to be grateful that Sony has blessed us with a third installment of its most successful comic book franchise, even if this trilogy-capping adventure tends to forget that having Venom in it means that it doesn’t have to bother with all of the other bullshit endemic to its dying genre.
Here’s the thing: When you have Tom Hardy bickering with a man-eating, canapé-licking, Osho-quoting alien symbiote who shares his body like a Platonic soulmate, you really don’t need to waste time on interminable battles with CGI space insects or strand overqualified actors like Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor in empty jargon roles that even they can’t manage to save.
2021’s “Let There Be Carnage” had the right idea when it eschewed an extinction-level villain in favor of Woody Harrelson playing a serial killer named Cletus, but Kelly Marcel’s “Venom: The Last Dance” — which finds the series’ longtime screenwriter matching the same run-and-gun raggedness that directors Andy Serkis and Ruben Fleischer brought to these movies before her — cheats back towards the generic superhero crap that Eddie Brock and his extraterrestrial bestie had largely managed to avoid, even as it does what it can to deepen the marriage between them.
That isn’t much. We just about reached the limits of their union in the last film, and all that’s really left for Marcel to do here is let the “Lethal Protector” go out in a ridiculous blaze of glory. But “The Last Dance” is still a fun time when it focuses on its core friendship (or uncivil union, or whatever you want to call it), its comic sensibilities are still much sharper and stranger than anything Deadpool could ever come up with, and it’s still less of a letdown than the other recent threequel that shares its subtitle. “Magic Mike” wins out when it comes to the actual dancing, but there’s no question that “Venom” has the edge when it comes to watching a perma-hungover Tom Hardy wear his own shoulders like an inflatable neck pillow.
Defying the scourge of comic book movie bloat even as it forms into a grand finale (a franchise tradition that Marcel manages to maintain in spite of a limp third act that feels like it could belong to any C-grade MCU film), “The Last Dance” would much rather be a tattered 90-minute goof than an imperious two-and-a-half-hour wank. Needless to say, it doesn’t waste any time putting its cards on the table, which it accomplishes with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it prologue that’s shot with the same dingy lighting this series has always used to emphasize its own junky self-image.
Somewhere in deepest space, a gray-haired ghoul called Knull — who apparently created the symbiotes as a weapon to conquer the universe, only for them to imprison him on a colorless soundstage — has decided that he’s ready to break free, kill everything, and make good on the mega-powerful “Marvel Snap” card that bears his image (a vital component of any destroy-based deck). Escaping his shackles will require the use of the “Codex,” which is inconveniently lodged into the top of Venom’s spine for reasons that aren’t worth explaining here.
In lieu of being able to travel (or even sit up in his space chair), Knull dispatches an alien race of Zerg-ass bug monsters to kill our beloved hero, which means that Eddie and Brock will spend the better part of this story running away from giant insects in lieu of dealing with a less generic threat. This franchise has always benefited from its lack of an overarching supervillain, but “The Last Dance” would rather cram the entire first phase of the MCU’s Thanos arc into a single film than find a more organic way of separating Eddie from Venom.
And, as promised by the movie’s poster, death will do them part. The Xenophage are basically unkillable, and either Venom or Eddie will have to die in order to break the Codex and save the universe from being Knull-ified — a detail that makes it very difficult to root for both of them to survive, and even harder to understand why the rest of the symbiotes would rather help Venom than save their entire species by killing one of their own. I guess they’re friends? Maybe they all formed a deep emotional connection on the meteor they rode to Earth in the first movie.
Whatever the case, the movie’s human antagonist takes a more practical approach to the problem; alien-hunting American soldier Rex Strickland wants to kill Eddie and/or Venom with extreme prejudice, and honestly he might seem like a pretty sensible guy if not for how well Ejiofor plays a jerk. The character’s prickish disposition is contrasted against Temple’s wonderfully named but woefully underwritten Dr. Payne, a symbiote-loving scientist who spends the entire film deep within the bowels of her secret lab beneath Area 51. Her character brings a real “Ted Lasso” vibe to this story about a shape-shifting goo monster who likes to eat people’s heads, and that honestly might have worked to its benefit had Dr. Payne been given anything — and I mean anything — to do besides ogle her alien captives.
It’s only a matter of time before Eddie and Venom find themselves in Dr. Payne’s lab, as the duo — falsely accused of killing someone who’s very much alive — begin the film as fugitives in desperate need of a safe haven. Venom targets New York for lore reasons, but “The Last Dance” hardly makes it further east than Nevada, by which point it’s already run out of gas.
The journey really is the destination with this aborted road trip of a movie, the first half of which frequently delivers on the potential of stranding Eddie and Venom in the middle of nowhere. Michelle Williams is sorely missed as Eddie’s love interest (unfazed by the fact that her ex-boyfriend had become possessed by a gooey alien symbiote, her character was a priceless backstop for all of the comedy in the previous two movies), but Eddie’s folie à deux with the monster inside of him has become too all-consuming to accommodate a third wheel.
The relationship between them has always been as mutable as Venom itself, and Marcel has mastered the duo’s rare ability to reflect several dynamics at once: an ego and its id, a pair of fraternal twins, an old married couple, etc. Hardy isn’t asked to do too many new tricks, but “what if an exasperated journalist who sounds like Al Capone were molecularly bonded with a hedonistic Cookie Monster from Hell?” isn’t the kind of thing that requires a ton of iteration to stay fresh.
While Venom’s antics may not be as inspired as they were in the previous film, nor his puppy-like tenderness — once a sweet surprise — quite so unexpected, his lust for life still makes everything he does at least a little funny, whether he’s playing a slot machine for the first time in Vegas or singing a wistful cover of a certain David Bowie classic when Eddie hitches a ride with an alien-obsessed hippie played by Rhys Ifans (another Marvel alum whose presence here, like Ejiofor’s, serves to complicate this film’s broadly irrelevant but annoyingly inconsistent relationship to the MCU).
Hardy has never really gotten the credit he deserves for giving one of the most difficult and dynamic performances that comic book movies have ever seen, and while “The Last Dance” gets away from that for long stretches at a time (even the wacky sequence where Venom inhabits a variety of different animals pulls focus from what this franchise does best), at least the film ends with a fittingly poignant/ridiculous tribute to the greatest love story ever told about a man and his symbiotic alien goo.
“This is serious,” various people — Venom included! — repeatedly insist throughout “The Last Dance,” but it’s really not. Not even Knull, the self-described “Slicer of Worlds,” is scary enough to make the fate of the universe feel like it matters. But what this movie lacks in seriousness it makes up for in sincerity. Despite the film’s best efforts to melt its characters into the vast sludge of superhero cinema, the union between Eddie and Venom is simply too pure to be diluted down to nothing. Thanks to Hardy, even the least of the movies in this franchise is definitely something, and it’s something that its genre may not be able to survive without.
Grade: C+
Sony Pictures Releasing will release “Venom: The Last Dance” in theaters on Friday, October 25.
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