Review: ‘Venom: The Last Dance’ is in cinemas right now, and we should all take that as a threat

It is one of the great tragedies of film history that Sony’s Spider-Man Universe has gone on as long as it has. Five films in (with a sixth on the way), and this franchise has yet to define itself with anything outside of mirthless sequences of explosions and talking lab coats, all of them only marginally identifiable as comic book plot beat-adjacent.

But this franchise hides another sad secret, that being the Venom trilogy. Against all odds and then some, the films that have starred the SSU’s would-be anchor — namely, Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and now Venom: The Last Dance — have boasted a skeleton of a skeleton of a genuinely solid story about the beloved Spider-Man villain. This, however, only makes their ultimate failure all the more insulting, and Venom: The Last Dance in particular makes for a particularly childish, creatively inept final nail in this sub-coffin of this franchise; a franchise whose theatrical presence is a sure sign of creative dystopia if there ever was one.

Venom: The Last Dance sees Tom Hardy return to the fray as Eddie Brock, a journalist-turned-fugitive on the run following the thoroughly forgettable events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage. After being blasted back to their home dimension after a gratuitous and contrived Avengers: Infinity War reference, Eddie and Venom find themselves hunted by a militarized outfit led by one Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who works alongside Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple), his more genial foil who’s sympathetic to the symbiotes.

Enter Knull, the creator of the symbiotes who’s imprisoned on his homeworld, and has no hope of escaping without the codex, a shiny MacGuffin buried inside of Venom that he’ll tear the world apart in order to get. Cornered by the military and now Knull’s tentacled attack dogs, Eddie and Venom must prepare for the fight of their lives.

Venom: The Last Dance‘s incompetence is on full display right from the get-go; we’re immediately introduced to Knull, who rhymes off bullet point after bullet point of information about the codex to nobody but us audiences, all while angrily expositioning about his entrapment at the hands of the symbiotes. There is, admittedly, courtesy to be found in letting us know right away that Venom: The Last Dance has no intention of telling a story, and is instead a mishmash of childish novelties and elementary-grade writing. This might actually be one of the better compliments that the SSU has received in its lifetime.

This is not to say, however, that this film is completely void of cogs that could have fit into a much better machine. Hardy can navigate the character of Eddie Brock in his sleep at this point (some would argue that he’s been doing so since Venom), and while he seems to be about as aware as anyone that there’s negative dramatic heft in play here, he manages to scrounge up a morsel of watchability in the lower-stakes, fed-up-with-this-s*** scenes. Perhaps these stand out on account of the fact that, in another universe, the Venom films would have used Hardy’s attitude in those scenes as a key narrative building block. More on that later.

Venom: The Last Dance isn’t completely clueless as to superpower choreography, a much- overlooked aspect of the genre, and a key strength for the superhero movies of tomorrow to tap into. Indeed, certain scenes involving Venom and Eddie dishing out some damage come with some inventive, symbiote-enabled set pieces, but unfortunately, they’re only really noticeable on account of how bland an experience it is to watch the rest of the combat, and the film at large, really.

That becomes especially apparent when the rest of the symbiotes come into play, even if it will tickle the fan service nerve endings a bit. During the final confrontation at Area 51, Venom is joined by the likes of Lasher, Agony, and several other members of his species, all of them sporting unique weaponry on account of their symbiote physiology. A better version of this movie would have seen all the symbiotes prepare for the attack before it happened, setting themselves up with respect to what they can individually do in battle, and then allowed those capabilities to flourish visually when the time came. Instead, Venom: The Last Dance mostly opts to loudly bang a bunch of action figures together, forgetting about its story until it decides it should probably get back to that.

That, of course, implies that there’s a story to get back to. Even in the context of a comic book film, where even sizeable plot holes can be reasonably overlooked on account of the fantastical parameters of the world, Venom: The Last Dance is entirely incoherent on not only the narrative front, but on the writing front as a whole. Whenever the film isn’t subjecting us to another loud action scene-because-we-need-an-action scene, it’s snapping us all over the world to check in with characters that we don’t care about, rhyming off inconsequential dialogue that’s littered with such amateurishly-crafted humor, that you genuinely have to wonder if the SSU’s entire mission statement is to sour every audience member who’s undecided on the comic book movie genre.

It’s a film that leans on novelty because it knows it’s entirely incapable of making anything genuinely good. It uses scenes like Venom dancing with Peggy Lu’s Mrs. Chen solely to stave off its responsibility as a film and as a story, perhaps using its cover as a comic book movie to convince us that it needn’t be taken seriously, and so we should just laugh at the funny thing in front of us because nothing actually matters. What an utterly miserable plan of attack.

All this, when Venom has all the business in the world to instead be at the center of a fascinating love story, which the wider trilogy certainly had some sort of line on, albeit a very vague one. The romance inherent to the character of Venom — one defined by how much of a pain in the ass your partner can be, and your commitment to them regardless because, god dammit, you love them — is one that writes itself at times. All Venom: The Last Dance had to do was have a sincere interest in playing with that beyond Eddie’s happenstance irritation, and it might have been a somewhat functional final note.

But instead, Venom: The Last Dance signs off as faceplant number five of the SSU, and even if Kraven the Hunter somehow, someway manages to emerge as a competent piece of filmmaking, this whole enterprise needs to be a given a long, aggressive acid bath for its crimes against the world of cinema.