Venom: The Last Dance - Review

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

IT'S fitting, perhaps, that the Venom trilogy should end as messily as it began with The Last Dance, a tango of disorganised chaos that promises so much more than it delivers.

When it originally arrived in 2018, with a cast led by Tom Hardy and including Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed, hopes were high that this could be a dark superhero outing to measure up to Spider-Man - possibly even leading to a movie union between two of the MCU's most popular rivals.

But Ruben Fleischer's subsequent offering turned out to be the kind of movie that marked the superhero genre out pre-MCU - an almost '80s throwback to a time when the likes of Dolph Lundgren's The Punisher, Fox's juvenile Fantastic Four or even Nicolas Cage's messy Ghost Rider were the order of the day (big stars, low quality). Admittedly, Hardy's presence elevated it slightly, given the gonzo approach the actor adopted (fully embracing the inherent absurdity of the premise).

But there was a trashy quality, which carried over into the Andy Serkis directed sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which even brought Woody Harrelson into the mix to OTT effect.

The Last Dance does, at least, balance some of the franchise's more hysterical elements with an intimacy that has long been missing, opting - in its first half at least - to spend some time in the bro-mance that has developed between Hardy's primary character, reporter Eddie Brock, and his alien guest, Venom.

There's something oddly welcome about this dynamic now - one built on mutual respect and begrudging appreciation for what each needs to co-exist.

But while this contributes to a somewhat emotional final farewell, the rest of the film once again struggles to come together as a coherent whole - almost throwing too much at the screen in a bid to end things on a series high.

Primarily, there's the new threat posed by Knull, the creator of the symbiotes, who has dispatched a series of monsters across the universe to find and retrieve a Codex, something that is forged when a symbiote resurrects its host and can subsequently be used to free Knull from the prison the symbiotes trapped him in long ago. Needless to say, this could bring about planetary destruction.

But there's also another threat posed by a military commander named Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who wants to capture Venom and conduct research on the alien symbiote at the secret government research facility known as Imperium, which is located on the soon-to-be decommissioned Area 51 in the desert outside of Las Vegas. And a hippie family on vacation in search of Area 51 , led by a man named Martin Moon (Rhys Ifans), who bond with Eddie and seek to heighten his emotional investment with everyday people. 

And that's not forgetting two more researchers - Dr Teddy Paine (Juno Temple) and Sadie Christmas (Clark Backo) - who have a bond with the other symbiotes, and former police detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham), who has his own connection to events, having survived his own encounter with the symbiote Carnage.

With so many characters to juggle, it's perhaps little surprise to find that too many of them feel short-changed and thinly sketched - their appearance more in service to fan-boy pleasing. But even those fans may feel disappointed that, having been introduced to the big screen, their appearance is short-lived and largely disposable.

This particularly applies to Knull's non-entity of a villain, who poses little or no threat (despite being voiced by Andy Serkis), but also to the likes of Strickland, Mulligan and Paine. Hence, the talents of Ejiofor, Graham and Temple are wasted - and, quite frankly, they feel as if they are slumming it.

The action, while suitably over the top, also feels rushed and overly frenzied - with the protracted final face-off between multiple symbiotes and Knull's monsters lacking any real emotional investment, or clarity. As each new Venom incarnation appears, you feel there's more significance to their appearance than the film ever allows you to realise (unless you're a really die-hard fan). Even then, those same appearances are reduced to mere cameos that get lost amid the overall mayhem.

Hardy, for his part, remains an endearing presence throughout - and somehow brings his own journey to a somewhat satisfying conclusion (neatly juxtaposing some laugh out loud physical comedy in a casino with some heart-tugging dramatic heft during the final goodbyes). But for an actor of his immense range, this franchise still feels like a missed opportunity - the option to go for silly rather than coherent or even measured feeling consistently unwise.

What's left is more a feeling of what could have been, especially when surveying over the wreckage of what actually is.

Venom therefore remains one of those cinematic entities that filmmakers (including Sam Raimi in Spider-Man 3) continually struggle to get right, which given his entrenchment in Marvel Comic book lore raises the suspicion that he deserves much better than the disposable nature of these particular offerings.

Hope remains that the MCU itself - and Kevin Feige - might one day get their hands on him. But with Sony still clinging on to Spider-Man and all of his related characters, not to mention a somewhat unnecessary [and nonsensical] post-credits sting that suggests more than this franchise is clearly prepared to deliver, that may be a little while off just yet.

Certificate: 15

Running time: 1hr 49mins