It’s still just a little astonishing how invested Tom Hardy has been in his Venom series. Certainly it’s not on par with Ryan Reynolds and Deadpool, but it is a level of involvement in both producing and creatively in the story department that feels so strange given both Hardy’s acumen as an actor and the series’ largely standard studio superhero movie identity. Even with the distinct body-sharing concept, the Venom movies have been largely run-of-the-mill in style, narrative, and execution; formless, like Venom himself, latching on to what it perceives to be the prevailing winds in the genre. The second movie made more of a case off exploring the particular comedy dynamic of its Eddie Brock/Venom double-act, but that could only go so far within the bogged down superhero movie mandate. It feels like a fairly soulless project for Hardy to put all his weight behind, where most other actors of his calibre would merely use it as launching pad for something else more personal.
My theory is that Hardy just has too much fun performing Venom (perhaps not quite so much Eddie), who is certainly a character unlike any other he has played. But it may be that those days are finally over -though I’m sure both him and Sony could find a way back in this era of never-ending franchises. At the very least, he and director Kelly Marcel, who also wrote this film and both predecessors, treat Venom: The Last Dance as just that, it’s last hurrah.
The movie is curiously a road trip film that is unbroken for just about the duration. Quickly tying up a loose end nobody really cared about from Spider-Man: No Way Home (and half-heartedly declaring it is done with the multiverse -the second superhero film this year to do so in a telling sign), it follows Eddie and Venom on the run bound for New York, while being tracked by both a government organization working at Area 51 and an alien creature seeking to kill Venom for his Codex -a magical life force created inside the symbiote from Venom resurrecting Eddie in the first movie. These monstrous creatures, “Xenophages”, are established early on as virtually un-killable and will never let up in their hunt -forecasting that Venom or Eddie’s days are numbered.
The odd couple approach to the Venom/Eddie relationship is back and highly emphasized here to an intentionally silly degree; three years being enough time for Marcel, Hardy, and the other creatives to catch up with the memes and use such sources to drive the humour -now the fundamental part of this series that began under the unconvincing auspices of an anti-hero narrative. There is no mistaking the hero qualifiers here, even as Venom devours and in one case beheads the members of a Mexican gang. He and Eddie bond with a family travelling to Area 51, a section of the movie that in both tone and texture feels lifted from thirty years ago -Rhys Ifans’ ageing hippie feels very out of place six decades removed from that archetype’s prevalence. And all throughout the movie, Venom’s friendly side is stressed in his banter with Eddie and spontaneous personality, as well as an attempted aspect of pathos. Occasionally, these beats can work, though it is always achingly obvious when a bit is aiming for a specific reaction -like the extremely laboured “we’re Venom” line and associated timing gag featured all through the promos.
Hardy can find that genuine nugget between these identities, but one of the recurring issues remains his own performance as Eddie, fairly subdued especially in this movie and very literally dragged into the action by his symbiote buddy. There’s less of the outrageous stuff that gave him opportunity to play in the previous instalments, and his investment seems notably diminished compared to Venom. Still, he fares better than some of the cast, including Chiwetel Ejiofor in the very depressingly mundane role of a bland military guy, and Juno Temple as the intense scientist breeding new symbiotes with an entirely arbitrary tragic backstory (Temple is also the only of this film’s cabal of British actors who can’t quite nail her American accent). Stephen Graham, set up as an important figure in the last movie, is underutilized for the performance Graham manages to give. Only Ifans and Peggy Lu, once more as Mrs. Chen the convenience store owner friend of Eddie and Venom, manage to play some level of honest energy even if Ifans is just acting the walking stereotype.
Even for a movie billing itself as “The Last Dance”, the stakes are hardly tangible. The notion that Venom may die already is hard to grasp honestly given the work comic book movies have done to dispel the concept of endings and ensure no death is ever emotionally involving. But it is also that these symbiote-adjacent aliens have worn out their novelty -Venom is the only one who resonates due to his personality, however bare it may be. This movie introduces several new symbiotes by the climax, though in merely the Iron Man 3 sense of showing off a variety of designs simply to shallowly satiate fans and marketing executives. You can almost see Marcel pouring over comic wikis for symbiote characters that haven’t been used yet. They’re all pretty dull in appearance, distinguished mostly by colour schemes and breasts on the female entities; and of course the weightless intangible CGI for the action sequences don’t help these symbiote power rangers feel like much more than ploys, especially given how much of the film is ostensibly building to a personal climax for Venom. The rest of these just kind of get in the way.
The choice to lean into heartfelt sentiment ultimately was a mistake, and it speaks again to the filmmakers’ misunderstanding the character’s meme popularity for genuine emotional investment. Sony did happen upon a dynamic and formula that sort of worked for the Eddie/Venom duo; but that doesn’t mean they have earned a heavy closure. Nothing about the way this story ends feels truthful; rather it strikes one as an effort to reinvent the series at the last moment. I wonder if even Marcel remembers the details much of where the previous movie left off. There are beats where this movie almost feels like it is trying to be Logan -another ‘road trip’ superhero movie that at one point features a visit to Vegas. But at best it comes off as a movie trying to salvage a series in full knowledge that the Sony superhero universe outside of Spider-Man himself is dying a slow death.
And perhaps Venom: The Last Dance does achieve that a little. Bad as it is, it’s leagues better than Morbius, Madame Web, and I think it’s safe to say Kraven the Hunter too. If this is the end of Venom, it at least went out with a few laughs and across the trilogy some moments of fun and real spontaneity. It’s not much of a legacy at the end of the day, though not an entirely fruitless one either.
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