“Venom: The Last Dance” is the third and final entry in the Marvel movie series about a helmet-headed alien with scary teeth and Gene Simmons’ tongue who fuses with a mumbly overpaid Method actor. Or something like that. Since this is the grand finale, the film’s director, Kelly Marcel (who co-scripted the previous two “Venom” installments and wrote this one, now making her debut behind the camera as well), may have felt a certain lack of restraint. As you watch “The Last Dance,” the film obliterates any distinction between shooting the works and jumping the shark and just saying, “WTF, let’s do it!”
By the time of the second entry in the series, “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” (2021), the relationship between the alien entity and its host body, the fallen investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), who together add up to Venom, had settled into a comfortable wisecracking second-tier-superhero groove. “Venom: The Last Dance” follows up on that by going full buddy movie, with Hardy’s zonked, marble-mouthed Eddie as the disgruntled straight man and the alien now razzing him like the voice of Darth Vader on happy pills. Or maybe it’s just that the alien, with those basso stentorian tones, knows how to party. He gets all the good lines, as if he’d been placed on earth to one-up his host body.
When Eddie says that they need to travel to New York, the alien replies, “Let’s go. Road trip!” When they wind up connecting with what appears to be the last ’70s hippie family in America, led by Rhys Ifans as Martin, a gentle UFO nut who’s driving his wife and two children in an ancient Volkswagen van to see the fabled Nevada military compound Area 51, Martin says, “These are our kids,” which prompts the alien to predict “a lifetime in therapy.” And when Martin pulls out a guitar and leads everyone in a sing-along version of “Space Oddity,” the alien croaks, “This is my jam!” And I haven’t even said what happens when they get to Vegas. In the slot-machine room, Eddie runs into Venom’s old friend Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), the convenience-store owner who turns out to be a gambling fiend, and she and the alien wind up in her suite doing a fantasy dance duet to “Dancing Queen.” It’s a moment that should stay in Vegas, and that’s the kind of movie “The Last Dance” is.
But I digress, because there is — fear not! — a reliably humorless and generic countdown-to-the-end-of-the-world plot involving a cosmic villain and copious monster battles like the ones you’ve seen 8,000 times before. When you put Andy Serkis’s name on something, it’s a signifier of cred, but for all the personality he often brings it might just as well have been a computer voicing the character of Knull, who looks like the Crypt Keeper (or maybe Bret Michaels) with his head bowed. He was placed in a prison by his family of symbiotes, and to be released he needs the Codex, a mystic device that happens to be embedded in the body of Venom. And so it will be until one of the entities that make up Venom — the alien or Eddie — dies.
To ensure that this happens, Knull dispatches a fast-moving giant spindly creature (head of a demonic soft-shell crab, multiple legs and tails) that looks like it got lost on the way back from a “Starship Troopers” sequel. It has a way of slurping down human beings the way that some people eat ramen, and by the climactic showdown there are several more of these monsters. I should mention that if Knull ever does get his claws on the Codex, he has vowed to destroy all life in the universe. When Chiwetel Ejiofor’s hardass Gen. Strickland gets wind of this, his agenda is clear: He means to destroy Venom before Knull can claim the Codex.
But that all gets muddied after Venom shows up at Area 51, the site of a giant laboratory that’s about to be decommissioned by the U.S. government. Juno Temple is Dr. Payne, the scientist who still believes in the glory of the extraterrestrial matter she’s studying. When Stephen Graham, who someone should seriously cast as Alex Jones, shows up once again as Patrick Mulligan, the former detective, and transforms into the Christmas-green alien hybrid Toxin, she thinks he’s the bee’s knees.
The “Venom” films are part of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (that is such a tedious sentence to write, let alone contemplate). And maybe that’s why Tom Hardy, from the first “Venom” on, has chosen to offset the uncoolness of doing a comic-book franchise by putting his slumming in quotation marks, playing Eddie as a borderline doofus who talks like a grown-up version of one of the Bowery Boys. The performance has worked, in a certain way, because it kept the whole series light. But it has also ensured that the “Venom” movies are a lark and nothing more, geared to the arrested pleasure centers of fanboys: the more snark and CGI the better.
This one doesn’t overstay it’s welcome; it’s basically 90 minutes long before the closing credits (which include one of the most half-hearted teasers I’ve ever seen). Some will even say that the movie is touching — though given how much time we’ve spent with Eddie and the alien and all those oily thrashing tentacles, I didn’t necessarily feel this marked the ending of a beautiful friendship. The movie gives us a wistful montage of Venom’s key bonding moments set to Maroon Five’s “Memories,” and all I can say about this sequence is that it’s a whisper away from “Saturday Night Live.” The “Venom” movies have been a success, and sometimes fun, but I can’t say that they’ve really been good. More like comic-book place-holders that deliver. They’re also an object lesson in what can happen to an actor as arresting as Tom Hardy when he becomes a host body, merging with the alien of corporate filmmaking.