Review: Venom: The Last Dance
Sony’s Marvel Universe continues to flounder as the Venom trilogy comes to a messy and rushed ending in Venom: The Last Dance.
Picking up from the end of Venom: Let There Be Carnage (and Eddie/Venom’s cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home), Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom (also Hardy) are fugitives wanted for the murder of Detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham). With a plan to blackmail a corrupt judge in New York City to clear their name, the duo heads out from Mexico but almost immediately get waylaid and end up in the southwestern United States, evading alien symbiote hunters sent by Knull (the creator of the symbiote) and a covert government operation out of “Area 55” led by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Juno Temple. The plot feels barely fleshed out, with most of the details being dumped in exposition dumps by either Venom or other characters, and it’s shocking the hubris that Sony has in thinking they can set up their own Thanos-style villain in Knull in their universe who will fight, I don’t know, Morbius? There’s also a MacGuffin called the Codex that is stupid even by terrible comic book movie MacGuffin standards and its rules keep Venom from fully transforming for most of the movie, or else the alien symbiote hunters will be able to detect Eddie/Venom. There are also several bizarre scenes where the plot completely stops for comedic bits, like Venom dancing with Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) in Vegas or Eddie and Venom hitchhiking with a hippie family on their way to Area 51. Everything feels weightless and slapdash for what is billed as the big finale for these characters.
If Tom Hardy weren’t the star of these Venom movies and wasn’t 1000% committed, they would be some of the worst comic book movies ever made, but he singlehandedly made the first Venom and Let There Carnage watchable and ridiculous fun at times. Even Hardy can’t save The Last Dance despite another committed physical and vocal performance. There’s seemingly supposed to be some sort of emotional payoff between this unusual bromance. Still, everything is so barely explained or fleshed out that the climax has no impact, despite an inexplicable sentimental look back at the trilogy set to Maroon 5 to close out the film. Juno Temple’s character has a laughably terrible backstory, and she and Chiwetel Ejiofor have nothing to go on for their characters. Rhys Ifans offers some fun to the proceedings as the father of the hippie family who give Eddie and Venom a lift to Vegas but the movie makes the terrible decision to turn what should have been one-off joke characters into pivotal members of the climactic action sequence and it gets increasingly more stupid as it goes on.
Speaking of action, there isn’t anything that great going on in The Last Dance. There’s a decent opening where Venom “fuels up” by fighting and eating some criminals in Mexico. Still, there isn’t much action until the climax, a protracted fight with the incredibly dull and generic symbiote hunter aliens. Several other symbiotes are “introduced” (although you never get any names or sense of what makes them unique), and they are dispatched almost immediately. While set up earlier in the film, the resolution is such a contrived thing that would never exist in real life and only exists for its use in the finale. The finale also has a lot of the dark, muddy symbiote action that has dogged the trilogy since the first movie, where it’s just CGI goo slamming into CGI goo with nothing unique or exciting going on.
Venom: The Last Dance is a lackluster way to potentially send Tom Hardy and Venom off into the sunset. There are baffling choices and dumb decisions throughout the movie, and the setup for future movies in Sony’s Marvel Universe is laughably terrible. I’m not sure if it’s as bad as Morbius or Madame Web, but it’s definitely somewhere in that region as far as Sony’s universe goes.
