Venom: The Last Dance Review: Good Riddance

“Can you ever just turn off your brain while watching a movie?”

I get this question a lot when I tell people that I am a professional film critic, and the short answer is “No.” For one thing, it’s because of my enjoyment of keeping my brain on while watching movies that led me to my chosen career path. More importantly, however, (and generally more directly addressing the impetus of the question), I don’t actually need to turn my brain off to enjoy something stupid. I have more than my fair share of immature sensibilities and can appreciate it when style pulls a full on beat down on substance.

That being said, I’m also of the opinion that dumb fun has to be at least somewhat earned. I can ride with a confounding story so long as it showcases at least a glimmer of narrative cohesion, and I’m happy to spend two hours with idiotic characters so long as they are moderately compelling or demonstrate a modicum of depth that I can connect with. It’s not a high bar – and yet, it’s still one that director Kelly Marcel’s Venom: The Last Dance manages to limbo beneath.

Expectations should not be excessive going into the film; the ineptitude of Andy Serkis’ Venom: Let There Be Carnage following Ruben Fleischer’s Venom taught that particular lesson (not to mention Sony’s baffling and dreadful other efforts at expanding its Spider-Man Minus Spider-Man franchise). And yet, like dark magic, the new movie still manages to disappoint. It subsists on plotting that is whisper thin despite the fact that takes every opportunity to overload scenes with exposition. There are exactly zero attempts at building anything resembling a character arc, and so little about it makes any sense that the stakes crumble like talc.

Following his incredibly brief stay in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – as featured in the end credits of Spider-Man: No Way Home – Eddie Brock and Venom (Tom Hardy) are reintroduced planning to go on the run because they are being blamed for the reported death of Detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham) from the previous film. They strategize a trip to New York so that Eddie can extort a corrupt judge and get revenge for being kicked out of the city… but then the movie just abandons that idea completely in favor of something much stupider and out of left field.

Via some terrifically clunky dialogue, we learn that the creator of the symbiotes is a being called Knull (Andy Serkis), and it has long been imprisoned following a revolt by its children. The only way for it to escape is via a MacGuffin called the codex, and it just so happens that the codex is possessed by Eddie and Venom. The sinister, but otherwise vacuous antagonist sends a herd of seemingly unkillable monsters portal hoping to Earth to get the plot-convenient key. Meanwhile, Eddie and Venom are also hunted by a scientist named Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple) and a soldier named Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) investigating the symbiote phenomenon.

Somehow, Venom: The Last Dance both explains too much and too little.

Venom: The Last Dance is at least a unique cinematic experience, in that it’s hard to think of another movie that bends so far backwards to explain everything to the audience, yet delivers nothing substantive. There are multiple scenes featuring characters blatantly laying out who they are and what they are doing to other characters who they know intimately (we’re talking pinch the bridge of your nose-level bad here), and yet there is nothing that actually propels the story. Eddie and Venom travel, they meet people and there are fight/chase scenes, but there is a complete lack of twists, dramatic shifts or revelations. Things just happen.

This is all bad enough to make Venom: The Last Dance incredibly boring, but for all of the painstaking explanation it does, there are also major questions it creates that leave you disengaging with the film. For example, the monsters that Knull sends – dubbed xenophages – are presented to be essentially immortal (one reconstitutes itself after being sucked through an airplane engine), and as such, you’re left bored wondering why the military is bothering to uselessly deploy conventional weaponry in the big third act action sequence. There is obvious space for a bit of creativity in imagining a xenophage weakness, but writer/director Kelly Marcel doesn’t bother.

More significantly, the xenophages can only track the codex when Eddie and Venom are in their combined form… and it’s not great when the most obvious and easiest solution to the biggest conflict in a movie is simply for the protagonist to do nothing.

Venom: The Last Dance has some fun moments, but none of them are well implemented.

With no thought given to story or characters, Venom: The Last Dance spends most of its creative energy trying to come up with fun bits for its titular duo – like taking out a bunch of dog fight-organizing gangsters, the symbiote bonding with an array of animals, and a wholly random Las Vegas-set dance sequence with Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu). Independently, these are fine ideas clearly meant to satisfy the type of weird that the fans of these movies have appreciated previously, but within the extreme mess that is this script, every one of them feels like it comes from a Post-it note rather than a natural development from the script. They’re impossible to appreciate by anyone who is trying to get onboard with the movies.

Things don’t improve with the swings for emotion either. The film tries to get dramatic by having Eddie end up traveling with a family heading to Area 51, bonding with a kid and getting quietly wistful about his time with his alien buddy, but it comes across as plastic and hollow amid all of the stupidity in the Venom movies and wholly unearned.

With all of the energy of the work pointed in exactly one direction, Venom: The Last Dance ends up feeling like a vanity project for Tom Hardy – and it instills sympathy for co-stars Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor, as their talent far exceeds the material they are given (beyond their complete lack of definable personalities or character arcs, it’s actually a challenge to keep track of the respective inconsistent interests of Dr. Payne and Strickland).

In the hunt for silver linings, Venom: The Last Dance has at least been promised as the final chapter of a Venom trilogy – so not only will we presumably not be getting more Venom movies, but perhaps a lack of continued box office earnings will halt the encouragement/funding of other potential disasters in the Spider-Man Minus Spider-Man franchise (I'm staring directly at you, Morbius and Madame Web). As a millennial who grew up loving everything related to Spider-Man, I would have loved to have been surprised to discover that this movie is a cool and entertaining end to what has been an underwhelming series, but instead I just say good riddance.