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October 24, 2024Audiences certainly won’t be expecting highbrow cinema or an Oscar-worthy performance from past Oscar nominee Tom Hardy in Venom: The Last Dance, but the first two films in the series have set some expectations for the level of entertainment on display. For the deep-voiced symbiote’s final on-screen outing, an unsophisticated villain and poor writing hinder the delivery of what anyone watching should be most excited to see: comedy from the Venom-Eddie Brock dynamic and action scenes with symbiotes fighting either to save the world or just enjoy a satisfying snack.
Venom: The Last Dance opens on the ghostlike Knull (Andy Serkis) commanding his army of monstrous xenophage creatures to find the only thing that can free him, which just so happens to exist as a result of Venom and Brock’s bond. The unexpected arrival of these unstoppable pursuers adds stress to Brock (Hardy), who’s already on the run from authorities and is now being hunted by the determined Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who has much less interest in understanding what the symbiote is than Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple), a scientist fascinated by alien life working in a facility buried layers under Area 51.
This film starts with a dark scene set in a desolate, undeniably creepy landscape with a seemingly undead figure ordering his minions and then cuts to a comparably much sunnier locale with Brock and a bartender (Cristo Fernández) previously seen at the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home. That jarring tonal shift is the first of many such rough transitions, with no attention paid to smoothing out moments between outright comedy and fatal fights. It’s hard to get into any scene because of the complete lack of consideration for a cohesive viewing experience.
This film also opts not to bring any characters back from the previous two installments aside from its dynamic duo, which means that anyone watching, save perhaps for the legion of Marvel devotees well-versed in all the comic book characters created over the years, require introductions to each new element of the story. They’re all quite clunky, particularly in the first exchange between Payne and Strickland where they fire expository details back and forth as if they’re never once had a conversation and exist only for the purpose of filling in the plot. In contrast, the not-nearly-that-bad yet almost universally panned other entry in Sony’s Spider-Man universe this year, Madame Web, brought in many human characters who were much more interesting and worthy of development.
Hardy isn’t the only performer in this cast with an awards track record whose talents feel underserved, though at least he gets to have fun in two roles using different voices. Fresh off four consecutive Emmy nominations for Ted Lasso and Fargo, this is hardly the career bump Temple needs since this part strips her of any personality or chance to shine. Ejiofor, an Oscar nominee for 12 Years a Slave, has his time entirely wasted here, and the only ones in the ensemble who seem to be having any fun at all are Rhys Ifans and Alanna Ubach as a pair of UFO chasers traveling with their children who provide Brock a helpful ride between the middle of nowhere and Las Vegas.
After enduring almost an hour and a half of convoluted plot setup, this film does deliver some moderately satisfying action scenes involving multiple symbiotes, but they still ultimately fall flat due to questionable logic about the rules of what they and the xenophages pursuing them are able to do and what they can survive. Believing in the science of mutants, aliens, and other creatures has never been crucial for enjoying comic book movies, but this final entry in the Venom saga doesn’t feel like it’s even trying to be coherent and the result is unsurprisingly quite disappointing.
Movie Rating: 4/10
Awards Buzz: Each of the first two films managed one nomination from the Visual Effects Society, and that’s about all this film should expect too, if that. While the superhero who spun this villain off might have had Oscar prospects, this one certainly doesn’t.