Tom Hardy in Venom: The Last Dance (2024)

‘Venom: The Last Dance’ movie review: Tom Hardy and his alien symbiote go Thelma & Louise

NOW STREAMING ON:

Eddie Brock and his friendly neighborhood Venom symbiote must save the entire universe from an ancient alien threat in Venom: The Last Dance, which debuts in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. The Sony’s Spider-Man Universe™ answer to Joker: Folie à Deux has a lot of interesting things going on thematically thanks to writer-director Kelly Marcel, who also wrote Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage, but fizzles out during an overblown anti-climax destined to please no one.

Venom: The Last Dance, like the previous film, is at its best when it ignores all sense of superhero plotting and lets star Tom Hardy do his thing. Venom: Let There Be Carnage was almost a buddy comedy that saw Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote grow apart and find each other all over again, and in this one they go Thelma & Louise and develop a deeper bond as they drive towards disaster in the American southwest.

Brock (played by Hardy) and the Venom symbiote (voiced by Hardy) open Venom: The Last Dance where we last saw them: getting drunk at a Mexican tiki bar within the MCU at the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home. But the promise of running into Tom Holland‘s Spidey are dashed within minutes as they’re sucked back into the Sony Spider-Man Universe™. And they’re still in Mexico.

Where to next? San Francisco fuzz is still on Brock’s tail after the events of the last film, but Eddie has an idea: let’s go to New York and blackmail that guy (name withheld) who got us fired. We all know, wink-wink, that Brock means Peter Parker, and by the context of that throwaway line, he knows Parker is Spider-Man.

The symbiote is up for a trip to New York too, if only to see Lady Liberty. But it’s a long ride to New York from Mexico, and while the movie dangles the prospect of finally seeing Spider-Man in this trilogy of films about Spider-Man’s biggest archenemy right in front of us, Venom: The Last Dance establishes a fireworks factory that it will never reach.

Instead, a good portion of this movie is Brock in an RV with hippie amateur UFOlogist Martin (Rhys Ifans) and his family, who are taking a road trip to Area 51 before the government tears it down in precisely three days. They drop Eddie off in Las Vegas, and the degenerate gambler symbiote blows their last $20 playing slots before a big dance number with none other than… San Francisco bodega operator Ms. Chen (Peggy Lu), the closest thing this trilogy has to an endearing character to bring back.

Venom: The Last Dance, like its predecessor and Joker: Folie à Deux, is a movie about a man struggling to control his inner demons, here represented by a very real monster who frequently takes control of Eddie’s body and sometimes bites off other people’s heads. It’s at its best during quiet moments of introspection, especially during the scenes with the travelling family. When Venom, the murderous monster that lives within Eddie, tells him that he would make a good father, genuine tears may be shed.

Of course, there’s a comic book story crammed in here too. It involves (checks notes) Knull (Andy Serkis), a symbiote god “older than the universe,” who sends out a tentacled symbiote alien lion monster to Earth to get Venom, because he formed a “codex” with Brock when he resurrected him in the past, which Knull can now use to destroy the universe, for reasons unexplained. But the bad alien monster can only see Venom when he comes out in full form, which gives the movie a nice excuse to save on its CGI budget, and if either Eddie or Venom dies, the codex is broken and the universe saved. Yay.

All this exposition is painstakingly explained by the living corpse of Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham), who has been resurrected by Area 51 scientist Dr. Payne (Juno Temple), who was once struck by lightning but the lightning passed through her and killed her brother(?), and she now works with assistant Christmas (Clark Backo) studying five colorful symbiotes under the protection of soldier Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) until they close Area 51 by using gallons of acid to melt the place down.

Writer-director Marcel, who has spent three movies nicely developing the Brock-Venom relationship and underlying themes about man’s struggles with his own monsters, clearly doesn’t care about all this nonsense, and neither should you. But while the previous Venom film nicely tied together it’s central allegory through the climactic carnage, this one goes in the opposite direction.

Inexplicably, this colorful comic book action movie ends on a real downer, which doesn’t satisfy on a thematic level and is likely to piss off any fans that have stuck it through the trilogy. Venom: The Last Dance really lives up to its title, because precious few will be asking for another spin with this franchise.

Venom: The Last Dance

SHARE THIS POST

Picture of Jason Pirodsky

Jason Pirodsky

Jason Pirodsky has been writing about the Prague film scene and reviewing films in print and online media since 2005. A member of the Online Film Critics Society, you can also catch his musings on life in Prague at expats.cz and tips on mindfulness sourced from ancient principles at MaArtial.com.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *