‘Venom: The Last Dance’ Review: Brainless and Disjointed

The Venom film series is one of the weirder phenomena to emerge from the superhero movie boom. Based on the popular Spider-Man villain-turned-antihero, the Venom movies rip up the Marvel Studios playbook and take an early 2000s approach to superhero cinema, stripping their source material to its most basic ingredients and isolating them from the context of their comic book universes. Their relatively small scope and total lack of pretense make them a change of pace from their cousins from DC or Marvel proper, but while that is theoretically refreshing, the resulting films are not actually any better, and Venom: The Last Dance is no exception. True to form for this trilogy—which supposedly concludes here—the brainless and disjointed Last Dance skates by on star Tom Hardy’s charm and a few good gags.

Hardy returns as Eddie Brock, a disgraced investigative journalist whose body is host to a goopy alien life form called Venom (also Hardy, doing a silly voice). After the events of 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage and their pointless cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Eddie and Venom find themselves hunted both by a secret Army black ops team led by Mac Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and by a beastly harbinger of Venom’s own creator, Knull (voice of Andy Serkis). While on the run, they engage in a clunky mishmash of high-speed action and light hijinx that’s never as exciting, funny, or heartfelt as it should be.

Venom: The Last Dance races through action and exposition at breakneck speed. The story does not build; things simply happen, one after another, with no anticipation or suspense. Every action is followed immediately by its most obvious consequence with no regard for the pace of the story, never mind the literal geography between the parties involved. The stuff that’s happening is occasionally fun or striking on a design level; If you’re excited to see Venom merge with a bunch of different animals or do an inexplicably choreographed dance number with recurring side character Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), you’re in luck. There’s a manic energy to some of the Venom business that evokes Jim Carrey in The Mask. But for all the GIF-able moments the movie provides, there’s no particular flavor or flair to the way writer and debuting director Kelly Marcel presents any of it. It’s a relentless marathon of mediocrity.

This ruthless quasi-efficiency applies to characters as much as plot. For example: The backstory for Juno Temple’s character, Dr. Payne, is delivered via a flashback so brief and so corny that it has no effect other than to deliver the information therein. Each character gets exactly one specific quirk or detail meant to endear them to the audience but then recieves no further depth or development.

The only supporting player who gets any substantial screen time is Martin, a friendly UFO-obsessed hippie played by Rhys Ifans, who picks up the hitchhiking Eddie on his way to Area 51. This is the only point at which the film slows down, as Eddie (with Venom hiding in his body) basks in the wholesome glow of Martin’s family and meditates on the nature of life, death, purpose, and belonging. These themes should resonate with the rest of the story, but none of it lands because nothing outside Martin’s van feels remotely real.

To his credit, Tom Hardy puts a lot into his performance, so much that it seems as if he’s in a different film altogether. His Venom is as broad and goofy as ever, even as he spends most of the movie as a disembodied voice commenting on the events of the film. Eddie, on the other hand, actually feels like more than a bad New York accent for a change. Without much dialogue to this effect, Hardy plays Eddie as a man wrecked by the events of the past two films and forced to ride shotgun in his own body and his own life. He’s on an inner journey that’s more interesting than anything actually happening in the movie. Hardy is the only player contributing to the sense of gravity, sincerity, and finality to which The Last Dance seems to aspire. Marcel and company even take a swing at the naked sentimentality of Paul Walker’s cinematic wake from Furious 7, and for a million reasons, it’s a total whiff.

The Venom films have been the only remotely successful branch of Sony’s disastrous shared universe of Spider-Man characters other than Spider-Man, so it’s no surprise that, despite providing Tom Hardy with an off-ramp from the franchise, The Last Dance dangles a few threads for a potential follow-up. While most of these sequel hooks are too trivial to detract from this film in any meaningful way, one of them leaves The Last Dance feeling more like a middle chapter than the conclusion of a trilogy. And yet, there’s so little promise in what’s left over when the credits roll that it’s hard to imagine anyone clambering to see the next one. For a trilogy that usually avoids the specific pitfalls of Marvel’s perpetual motion machine, it’s a disappointing and deflating finale.