Venom Week — ‘Venom: The Last Dance’ Is A Weird, Fun Capper To The Trilogy

Venom: The Last Dance is decidedly weird — and that’s considering the film series’ pedigree for weirdness.

Like those previous entries, all the single-handed two-hander scenes featuring Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock and Venom continue to shine with a pure, radiant energy. The characters’ charisma allow for crazy things like a Venom-ized horse galloping across the American Southwest. Venom’s need to be stimulated while Eddie just wants to catch his breath continues to be a great dynamic and the collaboration between the actor and the visual effects artists makes it believable and fun. That aspect of the third entry, in which Venom and Eddie essentially hitchhike toward New York following the events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, is rock solid.

Then there’s the other half, a collection of scenes with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Juno Temple as a solider and scientist, respectively, conducting research on symbiotes at a super-secret military facility. From the way we learn about Temple’s Dr. Payne to the entirety of Ejiofor’s performance, we glimpse a more straight-laced version of the film. It attempts a deeper character study even when the 109-minute runtime does not allow for it. One the plus side, this means all of the new characters introduced are much stronger than the freshman class of Let There Carnage — which is a strange occurrence since Carnage scriptwriter Kelly Marcel is back for this third outing, working with Hardy on the story. She is also the director this time! Perhaps that additional creative control gave her the bandwidth to make Payne and Ejiofor’s Strickland more developed. Even other characters introduced at their secret base sparkle with the suggestion of life.

And like the original Venom, this group of characters seem inspired by what we called in previous Venom reviews the “orphan” superhero movies of the late 1990s and early 2000s. That is to say: a movie made without a concern for a larger shared universe.

Of course, therein lay the problem for this aspect of The Last Dance, those characters are at odds with the fun and silly road trip Eddie and Venom are taking. Consequently, it takes a few moments into any given scene to readjust to the tone. With Eddie and Venom, you might get a jukebox singalong or a dance number. Back on the base, Payne shares her heartfelt motivation for researching aliens.

The two halves come together agreeably at some point, and it results in an entertaining latter half, but that initial dissonance may leave some viewers cold. Granted, Hardy’s charisma may keep viewers invested.

Although, that assessment is more unkind to Temple, Ejiofor, and other actors in the film — like Clark Backo, Rhys Ifans, and Alanna Ubach — than they deserve. The actors do well with the time they are given and it is a genuine shame the film fails to round out their stories as satisfactorily as they could. But that probably comes down to wanting a brief conclusion. Another few minutes and the new characters might be strong enough to make you forget Michelle Williams and Reid Scott are absent this time … even if Scott‘s name appears in the credits.

The above criticisms might suggests the film is bad. It isn’t. For one thing, Marcel’s direction is generally assured. She knows how to get good work out of her cast, finds some genuinely new ways to utilize Venom’s powers, and has a confidence suggesting she has more films to her name than she actually has. Additionally, the visual effects (mainly credited to Industrial Light & Magic) are really well done. Sure, they remain splashy because symbiotes are splashy effects, but the visuals integrate well into the live action photography and the reality of the symbiotes (and their adversary) is never questioned. In fact, the only rough bit of effects work occurs at the beginning.

Oh! The beginning!

To go back to criticisms for a moment: one place the film definitely falters is its setup. Presented by the new villain, Knull (Andy Serkis), in an address seemingly directed to the audience, he explains a missing piece of Venom mythos that will matter for the film’s plot before letting his minions loose on the universe. Even though Venom movies always featured aliens, they never really had a cosmic element to them. Knull’s monologue attempts to frame him in similar colors to Gor the God Butcher (Christian Bale) from Thor: Love and Thunder, but the body of the film doesn’t really support that. The scene also strikes of a studio mandate to more readily convey the stakes, but it ends up making the threat of Knull more remote.

But, then again, this is a Venom movie and the foes are not nearly as important as they are in, say, a Batman movie. The plot is just an excuse to put Eddie and Venom in mad-capped situations and that the film does with aplomb. The Vegas sequence, in particular, is just a lot of fun.

That said, we’ll admit Venom: The Last Dance is not as fun as the first, a movie we had to call Your Weekend Cheesy Movie the day it was released in 2018. Nevertheless, it is still fun; much more than its immediate predecessor, that’s for sure. It may also successfully pull at one or two heartstrings as the movie also manages to generate a wistfulness about capping off an inadvertent trilogy. A hilarious trick when the film itself reminds you that Eddie and Venom have only been bonded for a year. But, as it happens, that year (six in our world) shows on Hardy’s face. If the film is truly the end of Venom as we know it, then it is easy to see why. And maybe that is also the source of the film’s more genuinely heartfelt moments. Time is passing and not every superhero character can go on and on.

It is a film that may not satisfy everyone, but we’re glad we spent more time with Venom.

Venom: The Last Dance is in theaters now.