Venom: The Last Dance (2024, dir. Kelly Marcel)

by Jack Martin | Oct 26, 2024

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 109 mins

UK Distributor: Sony Pictures

UK Release Date: 25 October 2024

WHO’S IN VENOM: THE LAST DANCE?

Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach, Stephen Graham, Clark Backo, Cristo Fernández

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Kelly Marcel (director, writer, producer), Avi Arad, Tom Hardy, Hutch Parker, Amy Pascal and Matt Tolmach (producers), Dan Deacon (composer), Fabian Wagner (cinematographer), Mark Sanger (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

Eddie Brock (Hardy) and his symbiote partner Venom go on the run…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON VENOM: THE LAST DANCE?

Never mind Morbius, or even Madame Web: the biggest disaster of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (as it is officially known) to date is arguably the Venom trilogy.

The studio has had three chances to make a film worthy of the comic-book villain’s popularity – or four, if you count his all-too brief appearance in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 – and every time, the ball hasn’t so much been dropped but thrust deep into the ground until it can practically taste the core of the planet. The overly goofy and knowingly oddball tone of these films is a far cry from the genuinely menacing and badass character people know from the comics, while the bizarre choices made in several departments from the storytelling to the performances have effectively turned the once-cool character into the movie equivalent of Elon Musk repeatedly jumping on the stage at a Trump rally.

Now, with Venom: The Last Dance, which also marks the directorial debut of series screenwriter Kelly Marcel, the trilogy mercifully reaches its conclusion with perhaps the most baffling entry yet. And that’s saying something, given that this is a trilogy that has been largely defined by how baffling it is.

The last time we saw Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock and his symbiote buddy Venom, they were mysteriously transported to a whole other universe where a certain New York webslinger looked suspiciously like Tom Holland. But anyone who saw the mid-credit scene from Spider-Man: No Way Home will know that the potential hero-villain brawl was squandered before they even left Mexico, with them being transported back to their original universe before you could even figure out what the whole point of their multiversal travelling even was. Once back in their own Sony reality, we’re quickly reminded via some rushed exposition that Brock and Venom are still on the run for apparently killing police detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham, who spends most of the movie sitting and standing around like he’s reenacting that “Sad Pablo Escobar” meme from Narcos).

Brock and Venom eventually decide to make their way to New York, where they hope to somehow clear their names, but along the way they learn that they’re being hunted by not just army general Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is overseeing a symbiote research facility at a soon-to-be defunct Area 51, but also a horde of regenerating alien creatures sent by a powerful figure known as Knull (Andy Serkis). He, as it turns out, is the creator of the symbiotes, and was imprisoned by them when he made his plans for universal domination known, but now they’re after Brock and Venom because they share a “Codex” which could provide the key to Knull’s freedom and turn him into the Thanos-level threat of this particular cinematic universe that he is clearly being built up as.

That is, if Venom: The Last Dance can actually figure out what it’s actually trying to do. More so than the previous Venom films, this one starts off pretty chaotic and somehow becomes even more so as it goes along, with far too many strange set-pieces to note, among them Venom dancing to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” in a Las Vegas suite with his local shopkeeper Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), the symbiote taking control of a horse that speed runs through the desert, Tom Hardy uncovering an illegal dog fighting ring, and singing along to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” with Rhys Ifans as a weird alien-obsessed hippie and his family. Marcel, in a somewhat defeatist attitude for a first-time director working on a big-budget studio project, simply allows all this strangeness to happen without making much effort to provide them with much tonal or structural tissue, which in effect turns the movie into an anything-goes spectacle that very quickly spirals out of control.

Marcel, also the film’s sole credited screenwriter, appears to have little grasp over her storytelling in this weird little universe, as hers is a movie where things will just happen regardless of whether or not they make sense, like Brock and Venom suddenly hanging on the side of a flying passenger plane without any indication as to how they even got there, or other characters conjuring out of nowhere the ability to provide handy exposition on certain antagonistic forces. Everything from the motivation of the characters to the numerous plot devices are frighteningly underthought, rendering sudden decisions by certain figures completely random and always to make the narrative more convenient, or sometimes not at all. By the time it reaches a surprisingly poignant conclusion, one that to its credit appears to cement the fact that this is indeed the end of the trilogy, any emotional investment you may have had in these characters and the aimless plot in which they are trapped in has long since evaporated.

But above all, Venom: The Last Dance fails for the exact same reasons that the first two films did: it simply isn’t Venom. I am no expert on the comics, but everything I’ve ever seen or read about the character has always shown him to be a genuine menace, one with a twisted sense of right and wrong as well as a total disregard for whomever he ends up taking over, even (most famously) Spider-Man himself. None of these movies have shown the character in this light, instead depicting him like some annoying comic relief in a Lethal Weapon-style buddy comedy where he acts like a complete dork opposite straight-man Tom Hardy. He, incidentally, seems trapped in a similarly undefinable performance that somehow seems to be in on how ridiculous this all is while also treating the material like a sinister psychological thriller, one where he’s constantly talking to himself and engaging in completely unhinged activity like jumping into lobster tanks and working a slots machine like he’s a toddler playing with their first xylophone.

It astounds me that even after an entire trilogy of films, Sony still cannot seem to get this iconic and well-regarded character completely right. Now that his time in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe is seemingly over, one can only look to the future and hope that someone will finally do this pretty cool character some justice.

Until then, this is a pretty bad way to close out this chapter in Venom’s already sub-par movie career.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Venom: The Last Dance closes the trilogy on a suitably baffling note, with writer-director Kelly Marcel struggling to rein in the overly goofy nature of a narrative that ultimately doesn’t reflect why this character was originally so memorable in the comics.