“Venom: The Last Dance” is the third and final entry in the Marvel film series about a helmet-headed alien with scary teeth and a tongue, Gene Simmons, who teams up with a dark, overpaid actor. Or something like that. And since this is the grand finale, the film’s director, Kelly Marcel (who co-wrote the previous two “Venom” sequels and wrote this one, and now makes her debut behind the camera as well), may have sensed a certain lack of restraint. As you watch “The Last Dance,” the film erases any distinction between filming the business and jumping the shark and just saying, “Oh my God, let’s do this!”
By the time of the second entry in the series, “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” (2021), the relationship between the alien entity and its host body, fallen investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), is unfolding, and together they add up to Venom, settling into a comfortable superhero groove. Second degree. “Venom: The Last Dance” follows that up by turning it into a full-on buddy movie, with a marble-mouthed Eddie Hardy playing the disgruntled straight man, the alien now annoying as Darth Vader on happy cereal. Or maybe it’s just that the alien, with those Paso Stentorian tones, knows how to party. He’s got all the good lines, as if he was put on the floor to outshine his host body.
When Eddie says they need to travel to New York, the alien replies: “Let’s go. Road trip!” When they end up coming into contact with what appears to be the last 1970s hippie family in America, led by Rhys Ifans as Martin, a kindly mysterious being who leads his wife and his two children in an old Volkswagen truck to see the area of the legendary military complex in Nevada at the age of 51. “These are our children,” Martin says, which prompts the alien to predict “a lifetime of treatment” and when Martin pulls out a guitar and leads everyone in a singing version From “Space Oddity”, the alien shouts:this It’s my jam! And I didn’t even say what happens when they get to Vegas. In the slot room, Eddie meets Venom’s old friend Ms. Chen (Peggy Lu), the store owner who turns out to be a gambling addict, and she and the alien in her suite end up performing a fantasy duet dance. To the “Dancing Queen”. It’s a moment that should stay in Vegas, and that’s the kind of movie “The Last Dance” is.
But I digress, because there is – fear not! – A generic, humorless countdown to the end of the world plot involving a cosmic villain and brutal, exuberant battles like the ones you’ve seen 8,000 times before. When you put Andy Serkis’ name on something, it’s a sign of authenticity, but for all the personality he often brings, it might just be a computer voicing Knull, who looks like the Crypt Keeper (or maybe Bret Michaels). With his head bowed. He is put in prison by his family of symbiotes, and in order to be released he needs the Codex, a mysterious device that happens to be embedded in Venom’s body. And this will remain so until one of the entities that make up Venom – the alien or Eddie – dies.
To ensure this happens, Knull sends out a long, giant, fast-moving creature (its head is like a soft-shell crab, and has multiple legs and tails) that looks like it got lost way back from Starship Troopers II. It has a way of devouring humans the way some people eat ramen, and by the climatic confrontation there are many such monsters. I should mention that if Knull gets his claws on the codex, he has vowed to destroy all life in the universe. When Chiwetel Ejiofor’s hardline General Strickland found out about this, his agenda was clear: he It means destroying Venom before Knull can claim the codex.
But all of this goes haywire after Venom shows up at Area 51, the site of a giant underground laboratory that’s about to be decommissioned by the US government. Juno Temple is Dr. Payne, a scientist who still believes in the greatness of the extraterrestrial matter she studies. When Stephen Graham, who someone should seriously cast as Alex Jones, reappears as Patrick Mulligan, the ex-detective, transforming into a strange, Christmas-green poison hybrid, you think he’s the bee’s knees.
The “Venom” movies are part of Sony’s Spider-Man universe (i.e This is amazing A sentence is boring to write, let alone think about.) And maybe that’s why Tom Hardy, from the first “Venom” movie onward, chose to compensate for the uncoolness of doing a comic book series by putting his degradation in quotes, playing Eddie as a borderline idiot who talks like an adult version of himself. From one of the Bowery Boys. The performance worked, in a certain way, because it kept the whole series light. But it also ensured that the “Venom” movies were just entertainment and nothing more, aimed at fans’ stalled pleasure centers: the more satire and CGI the better.
This does not overstay its welcome; It’s basically 90 minutes before the closing credits (which include one of the most tepid teasers I’ve ever seen). Some will even say the film is poignant – despite the amount of time we spent with Eddie and the alien and all those oily tentacles, I didn’t necessarily feel like this marked the end of a beautiful friendship. The film gives us a sad montage of key Venom bonding moments set up in Maroon 5’s “Memories,” and all I can say about this sequence is that it’s a long way from “Saturday Night Live.” The “Venom” movies were a huge success, and were fun at times, but I can’t say they were really good. More like comic book place owners who deliver. It’s also an object lesson in what can happen to an actor as charismatic as Tom Hardy when he becomes a host body, merging with an alien in corporate filmmaking.