Eddie Brock and his Venom symbiote find themselves on the run when they become the target of a manhunt when Brock is accused of murder. Meanwhile, the ancient being Knull releases monsters throughout the universe in search of a codex held by Brock that could help him to break free and get his revenge after a lengthy imprisonment. Journeying to New York to start a new life, Brock and Venom find themselves amid new friends and foes alike, as they prepare for their biggest battle yet.
Sony’s VENOM franchise has left me with a big question mark over my head from the day it started. The character of Venom in movies without Spider-Man, the character from which he’s literally born in the comics? Their movies have turned the dark Shakespearean “duality of man” aspect of Venom into some kind of over-the-top extraterrestrial “buddy cop” movie series. What we have in no way resembles the character Todd McFarlane created so long ago, yet these movies are entertaining in their own way for what they are. Whether this series needed to exist or not remains up in the air.
THE LAST DANCE is the third VENOM movie. It’s certainly an improvement over the first installment, but can’t top the breakneck pacing and mindless fun of the second film. It has its moments (and maybe the best fight scenes in the series), but it’s still a scattershot, often incoherent mess that quite knows what it wants to be.
Where this series deserves credit is its leading man. Tom Hardy is a terrific actor and certainly makes the best of what he’s given here. His chemistry and the love-hate relationship he shares with the Venom symbiote is actually quite fully and entertaining at times, running the gamut from the genuinely emotional to the laugh-out-loud funny. Yes, what we get here is a complete bastardization of the dark and demented material from the comics, but it’s entertaining for what it is.
Where THE LAST DANCE falters is, well… just about everywhere else. One thing this series failed to do is to create a cast of well-developed supporting characters. Almost no one from earlier films returns here. There’s an attempt to create a somewhat fleshed-out scientist character who survived a lightning strike that took her brother’s life, ultimately choosing to live out that dream, but this is too much to cram into one movie. Had this character been introduced earlier in the trilogy, we might actually have cared. Chiwetel Ejiofor is a talented enough actor as well, but here he’s the one-dimensional stock stereotype military man. A man of these talents deserves better (when’s the MCU going to call him back to reprise his role of Baron Mordo?)
The movie simply has too much going on, most of which was not introduced in prior movies. We have a “big bad” that unleashes several monsters to retrieve a codex he needs to be free. Again, one-dimensional and without anything interesting or original to bring to the table. In many ways THE LAST DANCE plays out like a series of vignettes without a lot of coherencies. It’s truly sad when the best characters in a movie called VENOM are a family of road-tripping extraterrestrial hunting hippies (and in my screening, the audience clearly found a lot more to enjoy about these characters than anyone else in the movie). If anyone from Sony/Columbia is reading this review, give these characters their own movie. They’re clearly the best thing about this one.
VENOM: THE LAST DANCE serves up some good humor and fantastic action scenes, but it’s a lackluster ending to a trilogy that didn’t need to exist in the first place. Tom Hardy brings what he can to the role, but it Is what it is, and nothing more. If you’ve seen prior installments you likely have an idea of what to expect here. It’s better than the first movie, but can’t surpass the second which stripped this series down to its core of only what worked. When it hits streaming this will make a decent weekend rental, but Sony really needs to sell the SPIDER-MAN characters/franchise back to Marvel instead of continuing to do something that keeps falling flat.