“Venom: The Last Dance” (2024) is the third and possibly last installment in the Venom franchise that stems from Sony’s Spider Man Universe (SSU) after “Venom” (2018) and “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” (2021). Immediately following the events of the latter and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021), back in their dimension, Eddie and Venom (Tom Hardy) are fugitives on the run from the symbiotes’ creator, Knull (Andy Serkis), who sees them as the key to his escape from his prison. To prevent an alien invasion/apocalypse, Eddie or Venom would need to stop him or one of them would have to die. Is this the end? Let’s hope so.
“Venom: The Last Dance” is like a graveyard for good actors’ spirits to die. Hardy, who is one of the greats, is just phoning it in and looks as if he is in this film under great duress. Eddie is more of a beleaguered placeholder in an odd couple, buddy road trip comedy without the laughs. The first film was fun, and the second was uneven, but this round, it is almost as if they did not bother to make the human characters into archetypes, which is the bare minimum. They are just meat suits for the symbiotes to use until it is time for them to take the spotlight. Blame can be shared between Hardy, who conceived of the story, and first-time director Kelly Marcel, who wrote the “Venom” trilogy. Some actors have a talent off-screen as well as in front of the camera, but Hardy sadly emulates Daniel Craig’s attempt at storytelling in “Quantum of Solace” (2008), the weakest Bond movie starring Craig. Kinder people blame the weakness on not having the rights to Spider-Man, but Spider-Man could not save this movie. (Side note: if there was a Spider-Man, which one would it be? Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Tom Hardy or another person? Please feel free to weigh in on this issue. I vote the last one.) There needs to be a petition requesting that any Marvel related media stop falsely accusing the protagonist of committing a crime, so they are discombobulated. The hero always gets cleared. I’d rather have time travel, and I’m too old to invest brain cells in keeping different time lines straight.
Voicing Venom seems to be an easier lift for Hardy, but the whole affair is a depressing slog of dialogue barely tying together the action set pieces. Once the movie stops feeling obligated to care about the human beings, and it prioritizes the alien-on-alien conflict, which feels ripped off from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) and Sauron from “Lord of the Rings,” it at least has some value because of the high stakes: unstoppable xenomorphs…nope, xenophages, which are glorified living, breathing wood chippers with Nazgul vision who suck up and spit out any being that stands in the way of getting to Eddie and Venom.
Somewhere in the mess of the human drama, there is a lesson about not being biased against immigrants, i.e. aliens, as if they are all the enemy since Venom and other symbiotes are humanity’s only hope against Knull. The spectrum of human views of aliens runs the gamut. Commander Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who guards Area 55, the Imperium Project that studies symbiotes, would rather kill them since he has witnessed how dangerous they are and wants to protect people. Ejiofor has a lot of experience in live action comic book movies, “Doctor Strange” (2016) and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” (2022), and sci-fi, “Serenity” (2005), “Children of Men” (2006) and “Z for Zachariah” (2015), but “Venom: The Last Dance” may be the first time that he just did his job and did not make a meal out of a morsel. It is shocking that he did not give the kind of performance that makes one hungry for him to have more screentime as he usually does.
Dr. Teddy Paine (Juno Temple) and Sadie (Clark Backo), nicknamed Christmas, are scientists at the facility who are protective of the symbiotes. Temple is an unsettling, off-kilter actor who surprises in films like “Killer Joe” (2011) and “Mr. Nobody” (2013), but her character is just given a tragic back story and makes her idealistic though somewhat insensitive to Strickland’s founded fears. Temple is one of those actors with a presence that inspires a moviegoer to question her character’s agenda, but “Venom: The Last Dance” just reduces her to staring in doe-eyed wonder and wastes her. Backo is given less than nothing to do. She does not get a last name, but she emoted her butt off to act as if her character mattered when she did not have lines. She tried.
Then there is the hippie, alien chasing family with patriarch Martin (Rhys Ifans). Ifans is like an Easter egg because he played a villain, Dr. Curt Connors/The Lizard in “The Amazing Spider-Man” (2012) and “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Because he does not look disproportionately glum compared to his character’s emotional barometer, Ifans appears to be the only actor to survive this experience without having to go to therapy. Eddie gets to be wistful about not having a family when he is around them, but who is he kidding? With or without Venom, that man was not settling down. Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham) survived the second installment and is an unwilling member of Team Symbiote. Graham is getting paid well this year for appearing in “Venom: The Last Dance” and “Blitz” (2024) as a twentieth century Dickensian villain, and his vocal acting as an unnamed green symbiote was probably the best performance in the entire film suitably grounding the film by conveying the appropriate emotional reaction to Knull. Venom is too much of a wise cracking anti-hero to do so and engages in some mind-numbingly stupid behavior which attracts the xenophage’s attention.
“Venom: The Last Dance” has post credits scenes, which feels like a threat. It is supposed to be the last movie so why show theater goers that Knull is still a threat. The last one makes sense if you are the kind of person who will worry about what happened to a supporting character that does not have a name. There is an actual last dance, and Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) is one of the dance partners. She looks fabulous, but this franchise loves its gross out humor, so it is not long before she gets slimed. Hardy also gets an opportunity to show how he would look if he was cast as 007, but it does not last long and primarily serves as a link in a long running joke about shoes. Jokes are meant to be funny, and this gag falls flat. The dig at the MCU’s obsession with multiverse shenanigans was welcomed. One plane scene begged for a witty dialogue reference to William Shatner’s “Twilight Zone” episode, “Nightmare At 20,000 Feet.”
Even die-hard completists may have preferred an incomplete trilogy over “Venom: The Last Dance.” It is dispiriting to see so many excellent actors phone it in and let Michael Fassbender keep the crown of acting better than the material deserved. If the movie just focused on the aliens and the CGI, it would at least scratch the itch for watching impossible scenarios writ large on the big screen. All the symbiotes had more chemistry with each other and their human host extras like Jim (Jack Brady), the security guard. We hardly knew thee!
