VENOM: THE LAST DANCE - Mark Reviews Movies

Venom: The Last Dance, Sony Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 24, 2024

One can feel the sense of grudging obligation behind every element of Venom: The Last Dance. It's not a movie made out of love for, appreciation for, or even a basic understanding of its story and characters. We're left looking for signs that the people involved might have been under duress during production.

It's a nonsensical third and, presumably, final entry in the ongoing and diminishing adventures of Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and the alien symbiote Venom that lives inside his body. The previous two movies seemed confused as to what Venom's role should be—a villain, an anti-hero, or a straightforward superhero. This one just lets the monstrous entity be whatever for the sheer hell of it—an avenging fighter of crime, a friend to dogs in one scene and a thing that finds the smell of wet dog "delicious" several minutes later, a big old softy now when it comes to his relationship with Eddie, and a disco dancer in one moment that makes so little sense on so many levels that the movie has to be rubbing the absence of ideas in our faces.

The screenplay by first-time director Kelly Marcel, who also wrote or co-wrote the last two movies, doesn't even make a convincing argument that it has a story to tell, considering how often its plotting starts, stops, and restarts in just the first 15 minutes. Since Eddie/Venom's introduction into those other Marvel movies turned out to be a wash, that must be resolved first. The two are sucked through a random portal that brings them back to their dimension, and that's the end of that.

Then, there's the matter of Eddie being wanted for the killing of a San Francisco police detective during the climactic battle of the previous movie, so the pair decide to leave Mexico for New York City. Before they can reach their poorly considered destination, an alien, which has come from a faraway planet searching for symbiotes, launches itself from Mexico to a plane flying above the Nevada desert. That's quite the leap, not only terms of the alien's physicality, but also in logic and basic storytelling coherence. Action scenes just kind of spring into existence here, such as in this case and, later, when an entire team of soldiers from Area 51 seems to teleport to Eddie/Venom's exact, middle-of-nowhere location in a matter of minutes.

The soldiers want the symbiote because a subterranean research facility beneath the military base has been studying them since Venom and his cohorts arrived on Earth. They're led by Dr. Payne (Juno Temple), who gets a tragic flashback before we even learn her name, and Col. Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who was there when the symbiote-infested meteorite landed. Here, we also learn that the cop (played by Stephen Graham) from the previous movie is still alive, having been infected with a symbiote. He offers a grave warning about an intergalactic evildoer, whom Venom has just explained to Eddie minutes prior.

Don't worry about that guy, though, even though the prologue also explains what a threat he is and the minimal plot here is about preventing his alien subordinates from getting a codex that only exists in Venom's head when he takes over Eddie's body entirely. Obviously, the duo could just avoid this monster by simply not undergoing that complete transformation, since Venom's viscous appendages can do a lot without it. Anyway, Eddie/Venom have a chance encounter with their old friend Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), who just happens to be in the same Las Vegas casino they randomly go to while on the run, and Venom can't pass up the opportunity to dance with her in his full form.

The story just kind of happens here as series of half-hearted gags, the occasional bits of repetitive exposition, and plenty of coincidental interactions that result in action sequences. The humor is really a stretch this time around, since most of the jokes have been done already and Venom is now so much in superhero mode that the darker elements of his character have all but disappeared (He bites off the heads of several gang members in Mexico, and that's that). Hardy, whose knack for physical comedy was one of the few highlights of the last two movies, looks and sounds bored throughout this ordeal, as if he's actively resenting whatever stipulation in his contract led him to make three of these movies.

Nobody's heart is in Venom: The Last Dance. That's clear from the slapdash plot, the unenthusiastic performances, and Marcel's staging of the climactic alien-on-alien showdown as a lot of dimly lit, vague motions of digital creatures. A final little montage of Eddie and Venom together feels less like a sigh of relief and more akin to a gasp of freedom.

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