Venom: The Last Dance review – Let there be garbage

When it comes to reviewing movies, you often have to work hard at coming up with some kind of pithy one-liner to succinctly encapsulate your thoughts. And then other times, like in the case of the third and final Venom movie, the line just writes itself: An embarrassingly sloppy culmination for this unlikely franchise, there’s nothing that can… save The Last Dance.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve never been a fan of these movies. Even forgetting the awkwardness of Sony Pictures making a movie about a Spider-Man character without Spider-Man in it, purely so they could keep the character rights away from Marvel, the first Venom film in 2018 was fine in a pre-MCU Noughties comic book movie kind of way. However, its 2021 follow-up, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, was an aggravating study in wasted source material and stupid creative decisions. Both films at least had star Tom Hardy’s entertainingly go-for-broke, physically unhinged performance – as both journalist Eddie Brock and the titular alien symbiote bonded to him – going for them. In The Last Dance. though, Hardy seems visibly tired throughout, resulting in would-be gags falling noticeably flat, while the weirdly charming odd-couple vibe that Eddie and Venom previously shared now coming across as grating and puerile.

As this is supposed to be the epic final hurrah for this version of the character on-screen (until some Sony studio exec changes their mind), this is rather disappointing. But Hardy’s lethargy could be attributed to the fact that he seemingly had to make several different versions of this movie at once. At least I assume as much as it’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie where the “we’ll fix it in post!” approach is so painfully clear to see.

Writer-director Kelly Marcel (who also penned Let There Be Carnage and makes her directing debut here) seemingly tries to stuff about three movies’ worth of plot beats into one, abruptly editing out/in some aspects with glaring obviousness. Background characters with barely any dialogue suddenly take centre stage in the film’s finale with Marcel clumsily trying to get the audience to care about their fates. Other characters are strongly hinted as being more important, only to end up as nothing more than random plebs. And one mysterious unnamed character in the movie is even blatantly revealed in the credits to actually be a recurring figure from the first two movies that somehow had a massive change of fate… all of which is simply not mentioned at all in this movie. I swear, if I squinted my eyes just right, I could see the tape on screen holding frames together.

As for all the various plot beats, the first lands in the opening scene of the movie, as we get introduced to Knull, a dark god of the abyss who created Venom’s race of symbiotes ages ago, only for them to imprison him on a stormy planet, but still leave within themselves the key to unlock his proverbial cell. This key was inadvertently activated by Eddie/Venom during the events of the previous film and Knull now dispatches his new minions, the Xenophages, to retrieve it from them. We know all this because Knull tells us, talking directly to the audience in the first of many laughably awkward exposition dumps throughout the movie (prepare yourself for military personnel and scientists who have worked together for years all randomly explaining their full jobs and backgrounds to each other).

Slight spoiler for fans of Knull hoping to see the “King in Black” in action here: temper your expectations way down. In fact, just forget all the wild crossover rumours you may have heard.

Getting back to the military personnel and scientists, we have Chiwetel Ejiofor’s General Strickland, the blustery military liaison of a special covert division tasked with capturing all symbiotes on Earth; and Juno Temple’s Dr. Teddy Payne, the morally grey scientist in charge of studying the alien entities. Both want to get their hands on Venom for different reasons. Meanwhile, Eddie and Venom are mid road trip from Mexico to New York, on the run and trying to clear Eddie’s name after authorities think he was behind the death of a police detective infected by Carnage in the previous film. Along the way, they also encounter Rhys Ifans’s Martin Moon, a hippie who is trekking cross-country with his family to Area 51 to complete his lifelong dream of seeing an alien.

There’s also half a dozen new symbiotes, dance routines, a Venom horse, a newly tweaked version of the post credit scene from Spider-Man: No Way Home, and more. It’s a lot. Not helping is how Marcel’s pacing stop-starts throughout. We rush through certain key bits and then get an extended family sing-along sequence set to David Bowie’s masterpiece “Space Oddity”. Admittedly though, it is the most emotionally engaging moment of the entire film as Eddie contemplates the normalcy he’s given up for his crazy symbiote life. Similarly, the film’s third act boasts a rather competently shot battle royale that should give fans of the more recent Venom comics a huge grin.

A few more enjoyable moments like these admittedly pepper The Last Dance throughout, but their presence just helps to highlight how ungainly the rest of it is. You don’t need to devolve to a CinemaSins level of egregious nitpicking for the gaping plot holes and character inconsistencies to glare at you. For the most part, none of the cast are bad, despite Hardy’s sleepwalking at times. They just don’t have the material to work with, or, in the case of Ifans and his arc, are seemingly lost in the wrong movie. And when Marcel and co give us what is supposed to be an emotionally cathartic moment that touches on all of Eddie and Venom’s adventures to now (set to that saccharine Maroon 5 ditty, “Memories”, of all things) it comes across as so disingenuous as to be unintentionally funny. Hell, it’s probably the biggest laugh I had in the entire 100-minute plus runtime.

At the very least, I expected Venom: The Last Dance to be a better movie than Let There Be Carnage, as that bar was so low that an unhosted symbiote could slither over it. And initially, as I walked out of the theatre, I felt that it had met that minimum requirement. But after thinking on it some more, it’s clear that this franchise grand finale is even more of a grand failure. And this has been reflected at the box office this weekend past with the lowest opening of the entire trilogy by a large margin. With similar creative and commercial implosions for Morbius and Madame Web, and the upcoming Kraven the Hunter not exactly inspiring confidence, plus no other big screen projects in development, this could be the beginning of the end for Sony’s Spider-Man-less Spider-Man universe.

Venom: The Last Dance is in cinemas now, having released on 25 October.