How have we ended up with a Venom film trilogy that legally has nothing to do with Peter Parker or Spider-Man? What is going on? We have three movies about Tom Hardy doing a weird voice and being in a deeply passionate relationship with the goo parasite that lives in his brain. I’m not offended by this, as we’ve gotten plenty of beautiful moments between Eddie Brock and Venom, but this cannot keep happening! Based on box office reports the past couple years, at least it doesn’t seem likely. Billed as the end of the love story, Venom: The Last Dance is a surprisingly languid, cheap, and janky trilogy closer that is, charitably, a stupid piece of crap.
Featuring perhaps the most ADR exposition of all time, Venom: The Last Dance picks up moments after Venom: Let There Be Carnage with our romantic heroes Eddie and Venom (Tom Hardy) smarting from a multiversal hangover and on the run from the government and a weird giant alien with a wood chipper for a head. Well, that’s not true. The first sequence features the creator of the symbiotes, Knull (Andy Serkis apparently), lamenting his fate on a goopy prison planet. In a scene that feels like it was shot last month, Knull’s creepy voiceover explains that the key to his freedom lies in the “codex,” which apparently lives within Eddie and Venom because they are so perfectly bonded. Thus, he sends a monster to track them down. Meanwhile, Dr. Teddy Paine (Juno Temple with a WOAT performance) and military commander Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor, who needs to fire his agent) have been researching symbiotes for their own purposes, determining that Venom could be the key to their discoveries.
If that paragraph feels impenetrable to you, the characters in the film will explain it with offscreen dialogue about four more times. There are a few moments of fun, like when Venom possesses a horse and takes off across the desert, but they are few and far between. Even Tom’s weird voices feel strained this time, though it could be due to the running gag that Eddie is hungover and shoeless for the length of the film. A weird hippie family led by Rhys Ifans and Alanna Ubach are fun enough, but they’re mostly there for Venom to do something heroic and not just bite off heads. The other symbiotes with very ‘90s designs show up too late to make a real impact, but it’s darkly funny to watch them go through the alien wood chipper and spray slime everywhere.
The mid-credit scene features Knull threatening the universe, but we’ll never see him again. Sony, it’s over! Thanks for giving Venom and Eddie a bit of closure, but you can’t possibly think you’re making more of these things? Do you think Kraven the Hunter is going to make a billion dollars? What is wrong with you people?
I’ve become fully obsessed with watching the collapse. Each cinematic universe disaster this year, from Madame Web to Joker: Folie a Deux, no longer feels protected by the studios. Each one feels like a door closing. No more female-led superhero films! No more sequels to dark and gritty reimaginings of Batman’s naughty foe! We just need a few more failures and perhaps we can finally emerge from this humiliating era of blockbuster superhero filmmaking. For the love of god! Venom can’t have died for nothing!
Venom: The Last Dance
2024
dir. Kelly Marcel
100 min
Opens in theaters everywhere Friday, 10/25
