Venom: The Last Dance has officially hit theaters today, and to those of you who shelled out a positive early reaction to this film just days ago, I ask only this: did your fountain pop taste funny as you were preparing to watch this? Because some of you were suggesting this was one of the best comic book movies ever made, and I don’t know how to describe to you how big of a problem that is.
The previous two Venom films, despite being encumbered with countless technical and structural faults, at least had some semblance of an interest in the narrative capability of Venom and Eddie’s relationship. Unfortunately, the last Venom film prior to this one came out in 2021, i.e. before Morbius and Madame Web more thoroughly established Sony’s Spider-Man Universe as the place where creativity goes to not only die, but suffer for eternity.
And for some reason, Venom: The Last Dance completely bought into this newfound, superhero-hating identity, with loud, generic stakes and meaningless detours getting smushed together across its runtime in a bafflingly sad attempt to create some semblance of a movie. And yet, none of it compares to the undiluted degeneracy of the film’s mid-credits scene.
Warning: Spoilers for Venom: The Last Dance to follow
The mid-credits scene is as follows: the camera pans up to the lolling head of Knull — the villain who expositioned us to death in the opening scene — monologuing to nobody in particular that the universe will soon face his wrath, even though his minions failed to seize the codex from Venom and Eddie. So far, whatever; it’s as cinematically incompetent as the rest of the film, but nothing too outrageous.
And then, he finishes talking about how he’s going to destroy the universe before tilting his head up, staring at us, and saying “And you will watch!”
In that single moment, Venom: The Last Dance managed to find the most grotesquely sour intersection that any comic book movie could have waded into; an intersection of the film’s mirthless admittance to being a product, and the gross confidence that we are going to keep drinking their content just because the words “Marvel” are on it.
Indeed, how else are we meant to interpret that mid-credits scene? Venom: The Last Dance, like Morbius and Madame Web before it, never had any interest in being good; in fact, they barely had any interest in being movies. They’re nothing more than quarter-assed, vaguely superhero-coded scenes stitched together for the sake of sending a Marvel product out into the world, if not to sully the name of comic book movies as a whole, then to cynically make a point about how they can continue churning out the sloppiest garbage imaginable and still count on a paycheck by box office’s end.
And so to have Knull — this absolute nothing-burger of a villain — declare so non-diegetically that we audiences will absolutely watch whatever he has in store for this unholy universe that Sony quite blatantly couldn’t care less about, is among the most pulverizingly insulting slaps to the face that the SSU has ever produced. It is the bottom of the bottom of the barrel we’re now dealing with here. Do not see this movie.
Published: Oct 25, 2024 11:15 am