Venom: The Last Dance Review

Comic book movies have come a long way in the past 50 years, all the way from “you’ll believe a man can fly” to “you’ll believe a horse can Venom.” And if you saw that four-legged monstrosity in the trailer for Venom: The Last Dance and started hooting and hollering, you can rest easy knowing Tom Hardy’s third tango with a symbiote will likely deliver just what you’re hoping for. The Last Dance tests Hardy’s chemistry with himself in a road trip movie that wholly embraces the deeply weird tone established by this Spider-Man-without-Spider-Man spinoff franchise. Where The Last Dance really trips up is how it supports that tone, with a terribly formulaic plot that makes this superhero hangout movie a tougher hang than it could’ve been.

The major draw remains Tom Hardy’s dual, dueling performances as Eddie Brock and Venom, and the bickering chemistry the actor has built up with himself through the first two films... which is ironic, given the themes of symbiosis in play. With forces both terrestrial and extraterrestrial out to separate Eddie and his symbiote buddy, Hardy plays up the former’s addled, paranoid tics and tense physicality harder than ever, and you get the sense that he’s constantly on the brink of a breakdown. Eddie’s not completely willing to let himself become one with Venom, and his struggle with the uglier side of being a “lethal protector” represents The Last Dance’s only reliable source of drama.

While neither Venom nor Venom: Let There Be Carnage had particularly surprising plots, they grounded themselves in Eddie’s career as a journalist, each taking on the trappings of a different genre that fit the specific story Eddie was researching. The Life Organization’s creepy goals of human/symbiote union in Venom suited a sci-fi/body horror framework, while Let There Be Carnage highlighted serial killer Cletus Kasady with a crime procedural-inspired plot. But The Last Dance focuses on Eddie and Venom on the run after two movies of wreaking havoc on San Francisco, and Hardy’s human character feels a little less compelling without that investigative angle to fall back on. A Las Vegas detour may suggest a Hunter S. Thompson-esque foray into gonzo journalism – but that Venom horse is the closest The Last Dance comes to Raoul Duke’s hallucinatory trip to the heart of the American Dream. The sequel mostly sees Eddie at the mercy of his symbiote’s whims, more often just screaming and flailing as Venom does the heavy lifting in the action and chase sequences.

As for Venom, the symbiote is as food-motivated and attention-deficient as ever, and by far the most likable character onscreen. At the end of the day, Venom is a lovable, goopy doofus; the immature best friend Eddie needs to find space for as he’s growing up. He’s a dummy who likes slot machines, eating brains, and dancing with Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) to ABBA. And who among us can blame him? I didn’t like The Last Dance all that much, and I certainly wasn’t wild about either movie that came before, but Venom? I’d get a beer with that guy. I’m a simple man, and when it comes to simple, cinematic pleasures, there are few as sweet to me as Tom Hardy giving bigger than life characters silly little voices.

Venom is far more reliable at facilitating The Last Dance’s comic relief than its symbiote-fuelled action. Though the visual effects have improved a lot since the first movie, The Last Dance has little sense of novelty after two outings that saw Venom deploy his tendrils in about as many ways as you could imagine. There’s a plot device in play which leaves Eddie and Venom especially vulnerable to the Xenophage when they’re fully transformed, which could’ve opened up some interesting opportunities to put Venom on the back foot, but Eddie and Venom become aware of this symbiote AirTag quickly and it becomes an increasingly predictable way to redirect the Xenophage’s attention at best. At worst, it’s an infuriating source of irresponsibility during times when Eddie and Venom know they’re supposed to be laying low.

There’s little variety to The Last Dance’s rhythm – run, fight, hide, repeat – and even at its most chaotic, the action never rises to equal the boldness and creativity of the central relationship between Eddie and Venom. It feels like a step back from Let There Be Carnage, which struck a much better balance between those two elements. Kelly Marcel – who wrote both previous Venom movies – makes her directorial debut here, and I was hopeful that an increased role for the writer who first illuminated the unique pairing at the franchise’s heart would mean a deepening of the dynamic between man and parasitic alien. But at the end of the day, this is a big-budget superhero movie, and Marcel doesn’t quite find a balance between the epic and the intimate.

There’s also a major villain vacuum to contend with. A cold open establishes Knull, creator of the symbiotes, as a brooding and existential threat – but only if he can get loose from his imprisonment. The Last Dance is in no rush to set him free. Venom holds the key to making his escape possible, but Knull is forced to delegate his capture to his symbiote-hunting Xenophages: giant, ugly bugs with woodchipper-like mouths which spray the viscera of their victims from blowholes at the back of their heads. It’s a design choice I feel like standing up and clapping for as I write it down, but which becomes old hat by the tenth time it happens.

Despite being a tricky physical match for Venom, the Xenophage is just not a substitute for a villain of substance (certainly not one movie after Venom faced down his most famous foe, Carnage.) Knull is rarely seen, seldom spoken about, and apart from sending the Xenophage out in the first place, has almost no impact on the story – think Thanos in The Avengers, not Infinity War. It’s sequel-baiting of the highest order, and if you’re gonna subtitle your movie The Last Dance, that’s going to feel more egregious than usual. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s General Strickland gets left holding the bag and, as written, he’s only an antagonist in the sense that he’s in Venom’s way. His motivation for wanting to boot the symbiotes from Earth by any means necessary is totally reasonable, and there’s zero depth or specificity there for Ejiofor to play as he marshalls the government response to the alien battle coming Earth’s way. There’s also a shadowy organization pulling the strings whose name probably appears in very tiny lettering on a computer screen in some scene of an administrator giving threatening orders – more promises for a sequel that has no guarantee of happening. As I said, we’re establishing lots of new factions and players for a movie that’s supposedly calling a wrap on this whole Venom thing.

Helping the government’s efforts is Dr. Payne (Juno Temple), a scientist researching symbiotes, but her role in the story doesn’t extend far beyond acting as the military’s in-house Venom when it comes to keeping the plot moving by doling out new information. She functions sort of like Amy Adams’ character in Arrival, but with way less depth, which is shocking considering the amount of time The Last Dance spends establishing Payne and her tragic past. But then, storytelling precision has never really been the strong suit of these movies. That feels especially true once Eddie crosses paths with a UFO-hunting family on their way to Area 51, led by a very burnt-out looking Rhys Ifans. The family picks a hitchhiking Eddie up just when he needs some sound spiritual guidance, but their odd and child-endangering dynamic is more off-putting than endearing. By the time they’re filling the “Russian family from Justice League” role of getting in trouble during the climax just to give someone else a hero moment, the amount of time The Last Dance cedes to them feels like it could’ve been better used diving deeper into Eddie and Venom’s bond.