2018’s Venom is janky and often boring, but the divide between the movie’s standard superhero-brawler script and Tom Hardy’s “What if I got in the lobster tank?” improvisations in the dual lead roles as reporter Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote give the final product an undeniable appeal. Venom, in spite of itself, is weird and funny in a way that very few superhero movies get to be anymore.
Unfortunately, the sequel, 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, discards the tension between impulsive performance and by-the-books plotting, and leans into Hardy’s performance as comedy, with mixed results. And now the supposedly final installment (at least that’s what the title, Venom: The Last Dance, suggests) unhinges its toothy alien jaw and tries to inhale an Eddie/symbiote raunch-comedy road trip and a totally serious, high-stakes, ensemble sci-fi action movie at the same time.
Picking up from the events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage (as well as a credits scene from Spider-Man: No Way Home), The Last Dance opens with Eddie (Hardy) and the Venom symbiote (also Hardy) vacationing in Mexico, where they learn they’re wanted for the murder of Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham). Mulligan was seemingly killed in the last movie by Carnage’s fiancée, Shriek, but he survived due to symbiote synthesis. Eddie and the symbiote decide to go to New York, because Eddie — still an investigative journalist with considerable achievements under his belt, though Last Dance doesn’t do much to remind viewers about that — remembers he has dirt on a judge there, and can use it as blackmail to clear his name. Yeah, sure, totally, I guess.
Shortly thereafter, they realize they’re being hunted by even more powerful forces. As an opening montage and some lore dumps explain, Knull (Andy Serkis), the god of symbiotes and the void, who looks like a goth band’s lead guitar player, wants Eddie and the symbiote’s “codex.” That’s a bit of metaphysical whatsit they possess because, essentially, their host-symbiote bond is uniquely strong. Knull needs the codex to unlock his space prison so he can destroy all life in the universe, so he’s sent a cadre of hunter-killer monsters to Earth to get them.
This Knull stuff feels like it’s coming out of nowhere in this series, and that’s because it’s hot-off-the-presses Marvel Comics continuity, published at basically the same time that 2018’s Venom was hitting theaters. Last Dance lifts Knull’s character design and backstory, as well as the concept of codexes and the idea that the symbiote homeworld is a prison, from the work of writer Donny Cates and artist Ryan Stegman, who created Knull as the main antagonist of their wildly popular 2018 run on Venom, which culminated in the King in Black crossover event.
Hardy and Last Dance director/co-writer Kelly Marcel even use lines from Knull’s origin-story reveal issue as mic-drop moments, when one character impressively hisses, “The darkness has teeth.” Which would be way more fun if Cates and Stegman hadn’t been kept in the dark about their work being adapted for Last Dance — they found out from a trailer. They seem to be taking it in stride, but it’s far from a good look for Sony and Marvel Entertainment.
Anyway: God of symbiotes. Needs Venom’s codex. CG hunter-monsters from space. (Xenophages, a borrowed monster from Larry Hama’s 1996 Venom: The Hunted.) Got all that? Because we haven’t even met the rest of the expansive human cast of Last Dance, who come equipped with their own backstories, goals, and personality quirks. Juno Temple plays a symbiote-sympathetic scientist with a sad childhood. She argues with Chiwetel Ejiofor’s xenophobic general, who wants to shut down her research and eliminate her many captured alien symbiotes. Rhys Ifans plays an anachronistic aging hippie dad whose lifelong dream is to meet an alien.
The idea of expanding the cast for Last Dance to include interest outside Venom’s is noble enough. Much ink has been spilled about how Sam Raimi’s dedication to including the “little people” of New York City as players in his Spider-Man trilogy lent those movies a vital humanizing tone. Modern interconnected superhero movies normally only have time for superheroes (or characters who are going to become superheroes sometime in the next few franchise installments), and that’s almost always to those movies’ detriment.
But Venom: The Last Dance is so buried under its moving parts that it can’t do justice to any of them, in spite of Marcel’s efforts. (She’s making her directing debut here, after working as a screenwriter on both previous Venom movies and 50 Shades of Grey.) The Last Dance doesn’t exactly swing between Venom’s no-good, very-bad road trip and the rest of the characters: It leaps its tracks like a runaway train, cutting straight from an earnest moment of a woman contemplating a long-held childhood grief to an dance interlude set to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” It’s like Eddie and Venom are in The Hangover, but everyone else is in the very serious parts of Independence Day.
Even Last Dance’s take on Eddie and the symbiote’s relationship isn’t convincing this time around. Based on Last Dance alone, it is markedly unclear why Eddie likes sharing his body with this alien parasite, which is a real problem for the film’s intended emotional core. Here, Venom is not two characters in a messy but earnest relationship, working toward a shared goal (at least not beyond “surviving”). Eddie is a man whose body is controlled by the whims of an asshole toddler who can’t be reasoned with. That is, until the exact moment Last Dance’s climax needs the symbiote to actually be a character, and not a series of jokes, at which point it simply turns into an entirely different person.
Image: Sony Pictures
The original Venom found success in the mess of Hardy’s gutsy performance straining against stakes as mundane as Eddie interacting with his ex and her aggressively normal new boyfriend, after they watched him feverishly climb into a restaurant’s lobster tank. Last Dance, however, removes every human consideration from the equation of Eddie’s life — every social tie, every personal goal, every stake smaller than “aliens and the government are trying to kill us.”
So when Last Dance tries to recreate the antic lobster-tank moment — when the symbiote draws attention by making Eddie behave erratically in a Vegas casino, nearly kills him on a wild Venom-horse-hybrid ride, or throws away a full plate of home-cooked food in front of the people who handed it to Eddie, in an act of unlooked-for kindness — there’s no resonance. If Eddie Brock climbs into a lobster tank but no one who cares about him is around to hear it, does it make a sound? There’s apparently no end to the ways the symbiote can embarrass Eddie, but so long as Eddie isn’t meaningfully connected to anyone in the movie — as long as he’s lost everything but Venom, and is past caring about anyone else’s esteem or worrying about maintaining a normal life, that embarrassment is meaningless.
At that point, you’re just putting Tom Hardy in a lobster tank for the sake of putting Tom Hardy in a lobster tank. And it turns out that gets old pretty quick.
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