Venom: The Last Dance is an appropriately awful finale to one of the worst movie trilogies ever. Like its predecessors, the film is loud, chaotic, and nonsensical. Unlike its predecessors, it awkwardly aims for heart-tugging emotion at the end. That’s merely one of the incomprehensible choices director Kelly Marcel makes. The question most frequently brought to mind watching this disaster is, “Why?”
Tom Hardy returns as Eddie Brock, the former journalist who ingested an alien symbiote that emerges from his body in the form of a slimy black creature called Venom. There is some sort of evil villain in another dimension – the explanation for this is hazy, at best – seeking to find Venom and steal the codex inside of him for garden variety “control the universe” reasons. Eddie decides the best course of action is to leave their Mexican hideaway and trek to New York. Instead, they end up first in the middle of the Nevada desert, then in Las Vegas.
The villain is not threatening since we know virtually nothing about him. Rather than doing the job personally, he sends a disgusting-looking monster after Eddie/Venom, one that looks like the CGI-created creatures from approximately 6,000 other movies. Meanwhile, a scientist (Juno Temple) studies a symbiote in an underground laboratory at Area 51, under the watchful eye of military leader Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor). There’s already a lot going on here. The film nevertheless introduces yet another subplot involving an aging hippie (Rhys Ifans) and his family hoping to have an alien encounter.
Maybe it would have been possible to make a semi-exciting chase thriller about Eddie and Venom attempting to elude a deadly menace. That would entail committing to the idea. The Last Dance keeps stopping for bizarre detours that add nothing, like an inexplicably long scene where the hippie and his family sing David Bowie’s “Major Tom” in the back of their van. (If you need a bathroom break, this is your moment.) Even worse is a sequence where Venom dances to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” in a Vegas penthouse suite. As happens throughout the franchise, the insertion of goofy comedy is perpetually at odds with the desire to generate superhero excitement. This thing has never figured out what it wants to be.
After the idiotic nonsense and a chaotic finale that hits every predictable beat imaginable, the movie segues into a sappy 4-minute coda that’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve seen onscreen all year. We’re expected to get choked up, but the shameless sentimentality is completely unearned. Violent mayhem and dumb comedy don’t exactly lend themselves to emotionality. The whole series has made a point of being intentionally brain-dead, so the out-of-nowhere effort to be substantive is illogical.
Venom: The Last Dance otherwise has the same problems as the first two. The title character’s dialogue is often hard to decipher, the plot is paper thin, and Tom Hardy is seemingly allowed to infuse Eddie/Venom with unfunny bits of random weirdness. A few of the visual effects are shoddy as well. To be fair, the movie is marginally better than Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Then again, that’s like saying getting hit on the head with a brick is marginally better than getting hit with a hammer.
out of four
Venom: The Last Dance is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, bloody images, and strong language. The running time is 1 hour and 49 minutes.
© 2024 Mike McGranaghan