Review by Curt Holman
How popular is Spider-Man? So popular that Sony Pictures has a franchise of live-action films of Spider-man characters, but the web-slinger himself is never seen or mentioned.
The Venom movies are the best of the lot, but that’s not a proud accomplishment: By the standards of Morbius and Madame Web, the bar is so low it may as well be part of the flooring. Nevertheless, in 2018 the first Venom earned more than $850 million worldwide and cast Tom Hardy as both hapless reporter Eddie Brock and the rumbling voice of the titular alien symbiote.
Evolving from parasite and host to unlikely friends, Eddie and Venom provided an engaging, surprisingly comedic double-act that shone through all the CGI goop poured over the film. Both sequels have leaned further into the humor, with wan results in 2021’s Venom: Let The Be Carnage but considerably more success in what is presumably the series’ final film, Venom: The Last Dance. I wouldn’t argue that it’s a good film, but I enjoyed it more than its predecessors. It’s well aware of how silly is and doesn’t waste time pretending otherwise.
Following the events of Let There Be Carnage and a mid-credits cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Eddie and Venom find themselves on the run in Mexico. They’re wrongfully accused of murder and pursued by a secret military organization tasked with gathering the otherworldly symbiotes. General Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) views the aliens with suspicion, while Dr. Payne (Juno Temple), the science director, hopes to learn from them peacefully. With military action and hidden research facilities, The Last Dance often feels like one of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, only less bloated and bombastic.
Eddie and Venom’s main threat comes from Knull, a vaguely defined alien supervillain kept in an extradimensional prison by the symbiotes. For some reason, Venom contains the key to Knull’s release, so he’s being tracked by his servants, the “xenophages,” utterly generic CGI monsters with one memorable detail: When they devour a victim, they vent the blood from their gills in a hilariously grisly touch.
While the first two films primarily took place in the dimly lit streets of San Francisco, much of The Last Stand is a road movie that travels across the American Southwest. So there’s much more daylight than is usual in this kind of thing, and Hardy gets plenty of room to let his two roles play off each other. Venom, an impulsive Id-monster, gets Eddie in and out of trouble, whether confronting a dogfighting ring or falling off an airplane. But they also have quieter moments in which they reflect on their dreams and their potential mortality.
Marvel Comics introduced the character in the 1990s as a violent, “extreme” Spider-man villain largely defined by David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane. The new movies have made Venom likable, sort of. His oversized tongue, originally a monstrous, transgressive image, is more likely to be the source of a sight gag, lolling out of Venom’s mouth like a dog with its head out a car window.
Hardy gives Venom a deep, rumbling voice with echoes of Darth Vader, “Macho Man” Randy Savage and maybe Sweetums from The Muppets. Few superheroes are so excitable, emotionally transparent or prone to blurt lines like “We’re in deep shit!” Hardy produced the film and shares a “story by” credit with director and screenwriter Kelly Marcel, and seems far more creatively invested than you’d expect from an A-list actor in his third Marvel movie.
Between action scenes, Venom gets up to hijinks like turning a horse into a super-symbiote or hitting the slots in Vegas. Eddie, meanwhile, keeps losing footwear and finding unlikely replacements in a running joke that may not make you laugh that much, but you can appreciate the effort to make Eddie a Chaplinesque underdog. At one point they catch a ride in a VW van with a family of hippies (Rhys Ifans is the father) who are presented much more sympathetically than is typical for this kind of action slugfest.
Inevitably, the last act trades the movie’s charms for elaborate but repetitive battle scenes with monsters vs. aliens that have highly similar powers and designs. A running flaw in the Venom movies is that they have just too many symbiotes. At least, by crafting the film as a potential finale to the story, the filmmakers give The Last Dance a smidgen of emotional stakes.
One of the most overused phrases I see in social media comments on movies is “I had fun with it,” which seems like a way to praise a movie without saying whether or not it’s any good. Venom: The Last Dance isn’t good by most metrics, but I had enough fun enjoying the character-based comedy that the predictable sci-fi action didn’t ruin it for me. You could do worse – and Sony Pictures has definitely done worse.
Venom: The Last Dance. B-. Starring Tom Hardy. Directed by Kelly Marcel. Rated R.