At one point in Venom: The Last Dance, it’s mentioned that it’s been about a year since hapless investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and alien symbiote Venom (voiced by Tom Hardy) first met. Which is kind of wild to consider, given how so much and so little feels like it’s happened simultaneously within this daffy, daffy offshoot of the Spider-Man universe. When Eddie climbed into that lobster tank in the first film, could we have ever anticipated that there would be a Venom 3? Probably not. And yet, here we are.
Serving as writer and director is Kelly Marcel, who previously worked on the scripts for the first two Venom films, in addition to writing Saving Mr. Banks and the first Fifty Shades of Grey movie, giving her one of Hollywood’s wilder filmographies. Here, Marcel is working hard to juggle a lot of moving pieces, which is perhaps why this is a movie where every line of dialogue is written in a way to contain the maximum amount of information possible, eschewing subtlety and subtext for scenes where characters dump information about their backstory almost at random.
Some of that exposition is necessary, because the third Venom film has no mercy for those whose memories of Venom: Let There Be Carnage might be fuzzy, picking up on a few notable plot points. This includes the multiversal back-and-forth set up by the end of the previous film (as well as Hardy’s cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home), dismissed with a joke about multiversal nonsense that would have probably felt a little funnier if it had preceded similar asides in Deadpool & Wolverine.
Also having an impact is the supposed death of Detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham), who survived the chaos of Venom 2 by becoming host to another symbiote; I only mention it here because the movie seems to treat it like a semi-big deal, as key to the plot is Eddie being on the run from multiple entities because of his association with Venom. But are we even watching a Venom movie for the plot? Because that doesn’t really seem to be the point of them — the Venom movies function best as a delivery system for Tom Hardy being very weird in sometimes CGI-augmented ways.
And thankfully, there’s a fair bit of that here, as Eddie and Venom take their double act on the road while being chased by an alien crab monster — an alien crab monster so indestructible that fight scenes featuring it honestly get a little dull. (It is, however, kind of cool to see the blood spray out of the back of the monster’s head when its woodchipper-like mouth consumes a human body.) Why is there an alien crab monster chasing after Venom? Because Venom has within him a codex, which is a key that could unlock the prison containing Knull (Andy Serkis), the exceptionally powerful interdimensional villain who originally created the symbiote race…
Right around the first use of the word “codex” was when this movie started really feeling like a Transformers movie, which is to say the plot felt overly complicated, there were a lot of military guys running around and yelling about stuff, and despite the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the fate of the world didn’t seem to matter that much.
Maybe it’s because the aforementioned alien crab monster hunting the codex can only sense the codex inside Venom when he transforms completely into his full Venom state. So, the easy solution would be for Venom to not fully transform into his full Venom state at any point, thus keeping humanity safe. But instead, Venom decides he wants to live a little, so he goes ahead and goes full Venom so he can dance to the A*Teens cover of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” with the ever-alluring Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu). Does that make any sense? Absolutely not. Is it the silliest thing to happen in this movie? Absolutely not.
Venom: The Last Dance (Sony)
This is almost exclusively a cast of people from the British isles playing Americans (the only two Americans in the cast are Peggy Lu and Alanna Ubach) though the accent work isn’t too bad. Juno Temple plays a scientist who wants to study symbiotes (and has amassed an impressive collection of other non-Venom symbiotes for just that purpose), while Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a general who wants to contain the threat; both of their characters are rooted in the comics, but not in any way where their presence is exciting for the casual fan.
Meanwhile, Hardy once again seems to really glory in the exercise of discovering just how weird a performance he can give in a supposedly mainstream comic book movie; the more that The Last Dance leans into the idea of the bond between Eddie and Venom being a twisted romance, the funnier it is.
Which is why it’s a bit of a bummer that theoretically, this is meant to be Tom Hardy’s final Venom film, though who knows if that’ll actually be the case. After all, the Venom movies represent the only non-Spider-Man-starring Sony movies to represent a good return on the money the studio spent on the rights to the webslinger and his rogues’ gallery. So it’s not necessarily a shock that even for a movie called The Last Dance, the third Venom doesn’t actually feel like much of a conclusion. In fact, even after some light mockery of Thanos, the movie has the nerve to promise the rise of a new Thanos-like mega-villain.
Though maybe that mega-villain will be a problem to be solved by our friends Dr. Michael Morbius and Madame Web and The Vulture. Who knows, maybe that Kraven guy will also get involved. It’s all yet more clumsy fumbling on Sony’s part to create their own MCU equivalent; at least this time, it comes in the form of a movie that has no shortage of flaws, but is often pretty entertaining to watch. Sometimes you’re laughing at the movie, not with it. But there are plenty of laughs, no matter what.
Venom: The Last Dance arrives in theaters on Friday, October 25th.
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