‘Venom: The Last Dance’ Review: Goodbye Eddieeeeeee

If it’s true that a movie is only as good as its villain, Venom: The Last Dance stinks, despite the fact that its hero is actually pretty likable. This third Venom film contains at least three antagonists, plus a fourth shadowy figure who shows up twice in a darkened room full of computers where he gives vague orders to other bad guys for reasons the movie never explains. All of these characters are ill-defined, lacking in compelling motivations, and generally uninteresting. That’s, uh, kind of a problem.

That’s been a consistent issue throughout the Venom franchise, which have mostly squandered extremely winning (and admirably peculiar) Tom Hardy performances in stories that feature simplistic one-dimensional villains. To compensate for their deficiencies in other areas, all three Venoms have relied on Hardy and his eccentric alien “symbiote” to carry the load, mostly by bickering like mismatched partners in a buddy comedy. The Last Dance takes that concept one step further by sending Venom and Hardy’s Eddie Brock off on a road trip to New York City.

Following the events of 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage (and several Marvel post-credits scenes involving Venom that The Last Dance largely retcons), Eddie and Venom remain fugitives wanted for the murder of a police officer who is not actually dead — one of the many confusing, coincidental, and downright bizarre tangents embedded in The Last Dance’s screenplay. Bored with life on the lam in Mexico, the pair decide to head to New York City, where Eddie says he knows a judge who can help clear their names (or something; this, too, is extremely unclear).

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They’ve barely made it back into the United States before they’re spotted by a monster called a “xenophage,” a mindless and unstoppable symbiote hunting monster who works for a CGI bad guy named Knull, the self-described “God of the Void” who lays out his intentions during a convoluted opening voiceover. A former leader of the symbiotes now banished to some prison dimension he can’t escape, Knull seeks the “Codex,” a glowing Macguffin that would free him and supposedly only exists inside Eddie and Venom’s shared consciousness.

Although Knull can’t escape the Void, his xenophages inexplicably can, so he sends them to find Venom. If that wasn’t a big enough problem for our symbiotic heroes, they also have to contend with an obsessive military man named Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who works for a shadowy organization called “The Imperium” that operates in the desert beneath Area 51. The group’s main scientist (Juno Temple), who naturally possesses a tragic backstory laden with unresolved personal trauma, wants to study the symbiotes. Strickland just wants to destroy them. (If you’ve sat through all three Venom films, it’s hard to blame him.)

Ejiofor might as well have flipped a coin to decide how he was going to play any given scene; sometimes he’s Temple’s good-natured co-worker, sometimes he’s her fanatical adversary. Temple’s Dr. Payne is similarly baffling; she’s holding who knows how many innocent people (and innocent symbiotes) against their will in her lab, but she also resists Strickland’s more aggressive tactics, falling back on variations of movie scientists’ favorite reply in these kinds of situations: “We can’t kill these nightmarish death merchants from beyond the stars! We haven’t studied them yet!”

I have studied Venom. I’ve read comic books on a weekly basis since I was 12 years old. I’ve seen every Marvel and DC feature adaptation ever made. I wrote a book on the history of Spider-Man comics. And for the life of me I could not tell you where Knull is, what he is doing there, or why his minions can come and go as they please. Imagine making a comic book villain so incoherent that I, Comic Book Nerd #1, could not follow his plans. That’s where we’re at with Venom: The Last Dance.

The best reason — the only reason — to see all these Venom movies is to see Hardy indulge his most demented impulses as Marvel’s gooey, hulking “lethal protector.” As Venom, Hardy gets to crack jokes about his own schlocky movie from within the film itself, always in that quirky, rumbly Venom voice that makes everything he says even funnier. There’s a montage of Hardy’s Venom highlights during The Last Dance that had me full-on cackling.

But that, along with a few fun symbiote gags (this time Venom bonds with a horse!), amount to maybe ten decent minutes in a 95-minute movie. The marketing leading up to The Last Dance strongly hinted that this would be the final film featuring Hardy as Venom, and the movie desperately wants us to get emotionally invested in the heroes’ relationship —something that’s awful hard to do when so much of The Last Dance treats them as total goofballs. (“Engage your core! Engage your core!” Venom howls as Eddie parachutes back to Earth after a mid-air xenophage battle.)

The ongoing deal between Marvel and Sony to share the film rights to Spider-Man yielded three very good Tom Holland movies — and doomed pretty much all of Sony’s Spider-Man “spinoff” films to a pointless existence. Because Holland’s Peter Parker lives in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he can’t exist in the same universe as the likes of Venom, Morbius, and Madame Web, which leaves their films to subsist on the scraps of Marvel lore deemed too inconsequential to use in more important projects.

Why make a Venom movie (much less three of them) if the character will never get to meet Spider-Man? Beyond the fact that it is sort of fun to see Tom Hardy act like a weirdo, I don’t think Sony ever came up with a satisfying answer to that question.

Additional Thoughts:

-I wrote 1,000 words about Venom: The Last Dance, and never found room to talk about The Last Dance’s strangest subplot: A family of hippies (led by a shaggy Rhys Ifans) who pick up Eddie on his road trip while they’re on their way to sightsee at Area 51. When they get there, Ifans’ character does something that surely qualifies him as a nominee for the title of The Worst Father in Cinema History. If I wrote out what this guy did step by step, it would read like the craziest Reddit AITA thread in history.

-The three Venom movies were made by three different directors (Ruben Flesicher, Andy Serkis, and now screenwriter Kelly Marcel), but they all have exactly the same issues. I just hope Sony fulfills the promise of this sequel’s title.

RATING: 4/10