The “Venom” movies shouldn’t work at all. The only reason they even exist is because of the complexities of the licensing deal between Marvel and Sony, which allows Sony to make live-action movies featuring characters that are connected to Spider-Man — but without Spider-Man himself.
That has led to notorious failures like “Morbius” and “Madame Web,” and the best I can say for the “Venom” movies is that they aren’t as bad as those infamous flops. If they succeed at all, it’s through the sheer willpower of star and producer Tom Hardy, who is fully dedicated to his oddball performance as the title character.
Hardy once again throws himself into the role in the new sequel “Venom: The Last Dance,” opening Oct. 25 in theaters. The third and allegedly final movie in the franchise finds Hardy’s Eddie Brock on the run from the law following the events of 2021’s “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” while also being pursued by a secret government agency and alien hunters from the home planet of the extraterrestrial symbiote he’s bonded with.
It’s a chaotic, often incoherent plot that makes poor use of elements from the previous movies as well as mythology from Marvel’s recent Venom comic books.
‘Venom: The Last Dance’ is like two competing movies in one
Since the release of the original “Venom” in 2018, the character has become something of a camp icon, thanks to Hardy’s hammy performance as both Brock and the voice of the Venom symbiote. Writer-director Kelly Marcel, who makes her directorial debut after co-writing the first two movies, leans into that off-kilter tone, and most of the Eddie/Venom scenes in the first half of the movie are self-consciously wacky, full of terrible one-liners and winking references.
Eddie begins the movie in a Mexican bar where he was left during his brief sojourn into the main Marvel Cinematic Universe in the mid-credits scene of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” but that just gives him time to complain about multiverses before being transported back to his own dimension, where he’s a fugitive from justice.
Attempting to evade a nasty-looking monster sent from the other side of the universe to hunt down Venom, the pair go on a sort of meandering road trip. They encounter an eccentric alien-obsessed hippie played by Rhys Ifans and take a side trip to Las Vegas, where Venom and Eddie’s old neighbor Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) engage in a dance routine set to a cover of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”
Meanwhile, government scientist Dr. Payne (Juno Temple) and stern military commander Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) have been collecting and studying symbiotes at a hidden underground base, and they set out to capture Eddie and Venom, too. Their scenes are serious and dull, full of unwieldy exposition and unclear motivations. Temple and Ejiofor are great actors, but they can’t make their characters into anything other than plot devices, despite a treacly and confusing flashback about Payne’s trauma over the death of her brother.
The plot is both apocalyptic and irrelevant
The symbiotes and the government agents all become targets of Knull, the vaguely evil alien who originally created the symbiotes and was then imprisoned by them. In order to break free of his captivity, he needs something called a codex, which Venom and Eddie possess when they are fully joined together. It’s an ill-defined doohickey that serves as a weak engine to drive the action. Knull appears only briefly onscreen (played via motion capture by “Let There Be Carnage” director Andy Serkis), so his nondescript threat of destroying the universe doesn’t carry much weight, and his actual powers are never fully explained.
The villains in the first two “Venom” movies may have been underwhelming, but at least they were present, consistently reminding the audience of their vendettas against Eddie and Venom. Payne and Strickland don’t get enough characterization to function as worthwhile antagonists, or as reluctant allies during the big finale.
That final battle is the most substantial action sequence in the entire “Venom” franchise, but it still makes almost no impact, despite the proliferation of new symbiotes and the possible world-ending stakes. The design of the various new aliens is generic and unexciting, and the special effects are passable without being particularly dazzling or creative.
All that’s left, then, are Hardy’s goofy voices and the slightly homoerotic buddy-comedy vibe between Eddie and Venom. For audiences who’ve embraced these movies as ironic kitsch, that may be enough, but “The Last Dance” is a complete failure as a superhero movie. Of course, it’s also not truly the end — there’s both a mid-credits scene and a post-credits scene — but there’s no reason to care whether Venom will return, in any capacity or in any universe.
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