Review: Venom: The Last Dance (2024)
How, after two previous movies in the series, did star Tom Hardy and writer/director Kelly Marcel not get the memo for why people like the Venom movies? People don’t watch these for the action or the worldbuilding or, god forbid, the weepy dramatics. They watch them because they’re hilarious, campy movies that are essentially about a dysfunctional gay romance between a neurotic New Yorker and his goofy alien boyfriend. The fact that they’re superhero films is more functional than essential; the heart of the movies is in the domestic squabbles between Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote, Venom. The series likely peaked during a scene in Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), in which Venom walks out on Eddie, goes to a queer nightclub, decks himself in neon glow sticks, and announces proudly to the crowd: “I’m out of the Eddie closet!” There’s only a single scene in The Last Dance that captures such deliriously silly energy, where Venom dances to ABBA in a Vegas casino penthouse, but the rest of this third film is oddly muted in tone, and disappointing overall.
The Last Dance is the final film in an odd trilogy that never really solved its issue of not existing in the same universe as Spider-Man. Rights issues between Sony and Marvel Studios led them to exist on parallel tracks, with only a brief crossover teased and then abandoned between Let There Be Carnage and Spider-Man: No Way Home. So knowing that we’ll never get the Venom and Spider-Man meetup that we all want, we instead get a convoluted plot about an alien warlord sending monsters to hunt down Venom for the codex apparently hidden in his body. The frame narrative—which focuses on the warlord (apparently known as Knull) who created the symbiotes in the first place—is embarrassing through and through. These moments play at mystique, teasing Knull like he’s Thanos in the early MCU movies and should warrant the same affection and excitement from viewers. Worse, they are animated with such a risible level of craft that they resemble mid-2010s video game cutscenes more than big-budget movie moments. I know the Venom movies have never had great CGI, but Venom at least doesn’t look like something out of a video game, so what’s the excuse here?
The rest of the plot is barely better. Poor Chiwetel Ejiofor and Juno Temple (hot after her exceptional work in Fargo season five) show up as a military official and researcher, respectively, who are on the trail of the symbiotes. There are scenes at secret test facilities and we eventually get a climax where a bunch of other symbiotes are let loose and help Venom fight the monsters on his trail. The action is pretty bad in these moments—of course it takes place at night at a location vaguely resembling an airport runway (like most Marvel movies these days). But at least there’s a bit of dumb variety in the symbiotes themselves, who reminded me of characters who’d show up on a Saturday morning episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. There’s even one with an absurd purple tendril that looks like dreadlocks pulled back in a ponytail; it’s such a colourfully stupid visual that I couldn’t help but chuckle.
Oh, and then there are scenes of an alien hunter, played by Rhys Ifans, and his family who are inexplicably on a vacation to Area 51 and run into Eddie and Venom in the process. Perhaps Ifans wanted to break up his work as Westeros's most serious and power hungry father on House of the Dragon with lighter fare, but his performance here is baffling, trying for folksy, likeable American weirdness, but coming across as stiff and uncomfortable.
At least Tom Hardy is still Tom Hardy here, all babbling and motor mouthing and doing a weird accent that is neither necessary nor warranted by the character and his setting, but he is always undeniably hilarious. Any time Hardy’s Eddie argues with Venom is fun. Any time they have to do something plot related, it’s not. And there’s far too much of the latter. It all leads to the painfully self-serious ending where we get Eddie and Venom’s “last dance” together and you can tell that the movie honestly wants you to cry at the thought that you won't see this big, gay, black goo on the big screen again.
But like all comic book movies these days, it can’t even see this approach through to the end of the runtime. Of course an after credits scene teases a new tomorrow for the goo. Of course Sony won’t let well enough alone, even if they’ve failed to bridge the gap between Spider-Man and Venom for nearly a decade. Of course a movie subtitled The Last Dance is actually just a half-hearted attempt to keep the ball rolling, and a miscalculation of the modest fun of the two films prior. In the end, it might not be Venom’s last time on screen, but it’s definitely my last dance with this particular iteration of the character.
4 out of 10
Venom: The Last Dance (2024, USA)
Directed by Kelly Marcel; written by Kelly Marcel, based on a story by Tom Hardy and Kelly Marcel, based on the character in Marvel Comics; starring Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Stephen Graham, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach.