Some people doubted them, but Sony Pictures won out in the end. The rightsholders to the Spider-Man characters made a (financially) successful solo movie about the cheesy villain Venom—and then tripled down for an entire trilogy about the toothy, slather-tongued gunk with the outsized malevolent eyes who fuses with human reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy). Victory: In the past six years, there have been more movies about Venom than movies about Iron Man, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Black Panther, or Captain America. In some ways, this trilogy defies the character’s symbiote origins by eliminating any perceived dependence on the hero most associated with this bad-turned-good guy. But they also conform to them, by replicating the gut instinct that you’re supposed to feel about black goo from outer space: Yeah, maybe it’s best to keep that shit isolated from Spider-Man entirely.
Venom: The Last Dance nominally looks at the toll that isolation has taken on Eddie. Still on the run after the events of the previous film and wanted for the murder of detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham), who is not actually dead, Eddie and Venom agree to head from Mexico back to the east coast to clear their name, somehow. (One suspects Eddie is about as adept at name-clearing as he is at news reporting, his purported profession that goes entirely unmentioned in this installment.) Their cross-country trek is waylaid by the arrival of a massive, rampaging creature from Venom’s home planet, sent to retrieve a “codex” within Eddie/Venom that was activated when Eddie briefly died and came back to life (and will stay active until at least one of them dies again). That codex can free Knull (Andy Serkis), the symbiotes’ creator who they subsequently imprisoned for his designs on destroying the universe or whatever. He’s a tall glass of VINO—villain in name only, waiting in the shadows to be called up for his future spinoff-of-a-spinoff. There are allusions to more cosmic and/or multiversal concerns on the margins of Venom: The Last Dance, but most of it takes place in and around the Nevada desert.
If a barely-there CG mega-villain seething in shadow on a faraway planet while intoning about a codex brings to mind the now-defunct DCEU, wait until you behold the extremely Zack Snyder-y opening scene, and the fact that this Venom threequel was indeed shot by Justice League cinematographer Fabian Wagner. Naturally, in the fine tradition of Robert Richardson and Matthew Libatique, Wagner is stuck lensing a movie too frenetic to really show off his gifts, seemingly by house-style design. Kelly Marcel, who worked on the screenplays of both previous films, has been promoted to writer-director—sharing a story credit with Tom Hardy himself.
This does assure a degree of consistency in Venom: The Last Dance, as well as a final confirmation that yes, those other Venom movies were like that on purpose. Still, maybe Hardy and Marcel harbor some regrets. In one sequence, Eddie encounters a family led by the kooky Martin (Rhys Ifans), who’s dragging them on a pilgrimage to Area 51 before it’s shut down (which, naturally, entails bathing the facility in metal-melting acid). In a mostly-unexplained role reversal, Eddie feels discomfort around this semi-loving family, while Venom finds them delightful, even joining in their singalong of “Space Oddity” (albeit only inside Eddie’s tortured head). It’s a funny moment, chased with a surprising sense of yearning for the human connections Eddie lacks in his superheroic codependence. It’s also possible to read this as Eddie/Venom pining for a better movie, one that’s actually equipped to navigate the sudden accelerations and decelerations in plotting, the hairpin turns in tone, and the industrial-strength exposition vomited out almost exclusively by British actors doing American accents (other cast members this time around include Chiwetel Ejiofor and Juno Temple), series trademarks all.
If those regrets aren’t real, they should be. Reimagining a ’90s-style “cool” Marvel bad guy as a Universal Monster-style antihero is a great, potentially freeing idea for a superhero picture, providing the opportunity to connect otherwise disparate eras of comics and genre movies. Yet three entries in, the creature features of this trilogy are consistently de-emphasized—even in a movie where multiple symbiote variations fight cool, gnarly beasts that excrete a grisly blood mist from the back of their heads after consuming their enemies. Marcel scatters bits of lizard-brained mayhem throughout Venom: The Last Dance, like a rushing-river chase scene where Venom hops between multiple animal bodies while Eddie must fight off pursuing soldiers on his own, without ever fully giving the movie over to deranged abandon. Even the movie’s self-conscious bouts of quirkiness, like an impromptu dance number, are overcut and abruptly curtailed.
An entire trilogy has now been spent attempting to keep pace with Tom Hardy’s performance, a modern special effect unto itself—in both its try-anything elasticity and rushed, do-whatever sloppiness. It’s amusing that Hardy spends much of Venom: The Last Dance outfitted in shorts and a sweat-soaked t-shirt, perpetually hungover and constantly losing his shoes, muttering to himself—the Marvel hero as a bum, in the Rocky sense of the word. This makes it all the more disappointing when the Venom series can’t think in more imaginative terms than strategic deployment: Maybe if Hardy goes for it even harder, the greater Marvel universe will have no choice but to bend back in our direction! Like its predecessors, Venom: The Last Dance has a little fun in the meantime. But in the end, it’s just a writhing symbiote waiting for a host that never shows up.
Director: Kelly Marcel
Writers: Kelly Marcel
Starring: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Stephen Graham, Andy Serkis
Release Date: October 25, 2024