Venom: The Last Dance is being teased as the end of the Spider-Verse trilogy, but after two underwhelming films, does it end on a high note?
PLOT: Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his symbiote pal Venom are on the run following the events of the last film being pursued by adversaries that are both human and not.
REVIEW: Let’s face it – the Venom series has never exactly been a critical darling. Done on a relatively modest scale for Sony’s Spider-Verse and shackled by a PG-13 rating, this Tom Hardy-led franchise has, surprisingly enough, printed money for its home studio. While they’ve never risen above modest, turn-your-brain-off B-movie fare, they’ve been much better than other live-action Spider-verse offerings like Madame Web and Morbius. With this billed as The Last Dance for the character at Sony, does this short-lived franchise end on a high?
Here’s the thing – if you dug the other Venom movies, you’ll probably get a kick out of this one. It’s unapologetically a low-stakes superhero movie, reminiscent of the kind of fare Fox used to churn out in the 2000s. With a barely ninety-minute running time (the 110-minute listed running time includes a full twenty or so minutes of credits), it zips along at an agreeable enough pace. Tom Hardy seems to be having a good time voicing the increasingly agreeable symbiote. At the same time, his human host, who started the franchise as a hard-driving journalist, has become more of a likeable meathead in the vein of Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. This is the second film this year where Hardy is channelling Brando (after The Bikeriders), but this vibe still works well enough.
For the first half of The Last Dance, Venom seems primed to be the worst of the series, with Eddie and Venom’s trip to Mexico coming to an end as they find themselves hunted by a military group led by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Strickland, who’s collecting symbiotes for Juno Temple’s Dr. Teddy Payne.
Venom 3’s villain is impressively lame, even by recent Marvel standards, with Andy Serkis’s Knull, the creator of the symbiotes who’s been imprisoned by them, only on-screen fleetingly. All of the action is devoted to Venom fighting off monsters sent to recover the “codex,” which holds the key to Knull’s escape and lives in Eddie/Venom.
The film chugs along, with Rhys Ifans turning up for a little comic relief as a UFO groupie who, along with his family, bonds with Eddie. Meanwhile, a lengthy trip to Las Vegas feels like paid product placement for Paris Las Vegas, with the silliness ramped up as Venom hits the slots. The whole Vegas section is laughably filmed in the IMAX aspect ratio (despite mostly being played for giggles), so clearly, someone wanted the town to look as appealing to tourists as possible.
But, just when you’re ready to write the third film off entirely, the movie finally kicks into high gear for the rather satisfying last half hour. Here, Venom: The Last Dance finally delivers the Venom film we’ve wanted from the start, with lots of symbiotes turning minor characters, like Clark Backo’s scientist, Christmas, into people you want to see play a bigger role if the franchise goes on.
Yet, the movie also unforgivably wastes a ton of talented actors. Chiwetel Ejiofor has a nothing role as the stern military man hunting down Eddie, while Juno Temple is utterly wasted in a generic scientist role. At least for her, a potentially bigger presence down the road, if the franchise continues, could be in the cards, but if this is a one-off, they gave her nothing to do, which is nuts if you’ve seen how good she was in action mode during Fargo’s latest season.
In the end, like all the other Venom movies, this is a mixed bag. Director Kelly Marcel makes her directorial debut after working as a writer and producer on other movies. She certainly is as capable behind the camera as any other director who worked on the franchise. She’s delivered a fun movie, with the last half hour offering us the best take on the character we’ve seen so far, but I daresay it’s maybe too little to redeem the franchise in a significant way. None of the films have been offensively bad, but with Hardy in the lead role and some cast members brought in throughout the franchise, the Venom series should have been bigger and better. It was fine as a whole, but is fine really good enough anymore?
