The Last Dance was written and directed by Kelly Marcel, a longtime Hardy collaborator who also wrote (or co-wrote) the two earlier entries. That technically counts as a promotion, though it’s hard to imagine the woman who crafted the screenplay for Saving Mr Banks and injected some fun into the first Fifty Shades of Grey adaptation asking actors to deliver lines like Chiwetel Ejiofor’s “In my line of work, something terrible is always imminent” (well, you are in a Venom film) to Stephen Graham’s growled-through-a-porthole “The darkness has teeeeeeeeeth.” Graham returns as his detective character from the previous film, though spends most of this one locked up in a bunker, and makes us feel every last one of those nine Es while a computer-generated tear unconvincingly trickles down his cheek.
What happens in it, and why? The former question is just about answerable: as for the latter, good luck. After the events of 2021’s Let There Be Carnage, Hardy is hiding out in Mexico, but upon learning he’s a wanted man in the United States, he promptly decides to return there. New York City is the planned destination, but instead Hardy ends up wandering through the American southwest like Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas, albeit with a stompy, teeth-clenching gait that makes it look like poor Eddie experienced some sort of toilet-based mishap ten miles ago, and hasn’t yet had a chance to sort himself out.