Marvel and Sony’s Venom movies have always been buddy comedies masquerading as superhero spectaculars, and that’s even truer of Venom: The Last Dance, a threequel that cares infinitely less about story than scattershot ridiculousness.
To wit: Venom turns into a horse, a frog, and a fish, performs a choreographed dance number with his convenience store owner pal Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), and croons “Tequila,” “Space Oddity,” and “Dancing Queen” with an enthusiasm that drives his human host Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) batty. He also hungrily pines to see the Statue of Liberty and can’t control himself at a Las Vegas slot machine. When he loses big at the latter, he exclaims angrily, “Lady Luck is a fickle slut!”
Such is the absurdist tone of Venom: The Last Dance—in theaters Oct. 25—whose writer/director Kelly Marcel was responsible for scripting the series’ prior two entries. More competently constructed and helmed than 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, this ostensible franchise conclusion begins by recycling the post-credits scene from Spider-Man: No Way Home, with Eddie and Venom trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of the MCU in an alternate-universe Mexican bar before being zapped to their world, where Eddie is now (wrongly) wanted for the murder of detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham).
Unable to return to San Francisco lest they be arrested, Eddie and Venom opt to take a road trip to the Big Apple so Venom can see the sights. This is an exciting prospect for the alien symbiote, who makes sure to take a shot at Marvel’s recent storyline focus (“I’m so done with this multiverse s--t!”) on his way out the door.
Venom and Eddie hop a ride on a commercial flight in the most atypical manner imaginable, but their journey is interrupted by a giant insectoid extraterrestrial that attacks them on the craft’s exterior. This monster is after the duo’s “codex,” a MacGuffin that was created when Eddie previously died, is solely detectable when Venom and Eddie fully merge, and is the key to unlocking an intergalactic prison that holds Knull, an ancient deity that gave birth to the symbiotes, only to have them turn around and betray him because he was an apocalyptic menace.
A white-haired fiend who sits on a throne and keeps his head lowered so his face is never visible, Knull is introduced in an all-CGI prologue that resembles a video game cutscene, and he’s largely irrelevant to these proceedings, save for explaining why Venom and Eddie are pursued by the aforementioned beast.
For most of Venom: The Last Dance, the conjoined protagonists race about the Nevada desert and Las Vegas attempting to avoid their enemy—a lackluster set-up compounded by the fact that this villain is a generic, personality-free creature straight out of digital casting 101.
Fortunately, Eddie and Venom remain an amusing couple, bickering non-stop about Venom’s eagerness to have fun and his hunger for brains (he munches on a quartet of them during an early run-in with Mexican baddies), and Eddie’s procession of hangovers and frustrating inability to hold onto his shoes. Venom only very occasionally lets fly with a legitimately funny one-liner, such as when, upon hearing that two kids are named “Echo” and “Leaf,” he instinctively exclaims, “A lifetime in therapy!” Still, their Looney Tunes rapport is the spark that keeps the material animated enough to never completely bore.
Alas, Venom: The Last Dance isn’t just a two-man stand-up act; it’s a feature that’s obligated to supply an actual narrative. What it delivers is a whole lot of gibberish, much of which concerns Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a soldier who’s hunting symbiotes and collecting them for Dr. Payne (Juno Temple). Both of these government employees used to work at Area 51 and, now that it’s being decommissioned, operate out of the even more secret, subterranean Area 55.
Rex doesn’t trust the symbiotes and wants to exterminate them before they colonize the Earth. Dr. Payne imagines that they’re sympathetic beings. Unsurprisingly given Venom’s joviality, she’s proven correct when she melds another captured symbiote to the not-dead detective Mulligan, which informs them that their species is on the run from Knull—and that, should the unstoppable tyrant escape his confines, he’ll destroy the world.
Venom: The Last Dance doesn’t reference Ejiofor’s prior Marvel outing as Karl Mordo in Doctor Strange (presumably because this is set in a different universe than that one was), and it additionally wastes energy on Martin (Rhys Ifans), a hippie-dippy husband and father who’s dragging his clan to Area 51 in a flower-power VW van. This results in a couple of lame jokes about Martin’s organic-vegetarian ethos and Venom’s appetite for flesh and blood, and by and large, it’s a glaring time-suck, designed to amplify the action’s colorfulness and to provide Eddie and Venom with innocent friends to save during the chaotic closing battle against Knull’s minions.
Hardy repeats the over-the-top frazzled and frustrated routine he perfected in the first two Venom efforts, and his whip-crack repartee with his symbiotic BFF continues to be charmingly bonkers. The actor’s gift for physical comedy and exaggerated expressions gets a full workout, and Marcel devises a few novel ways for him and Venom to partner during their slam-bang skirmishes.
The computer-generated effects in Venom: The Last Dance are an improvement over those in the noggin-chomping behemoth’s previous adventures, although they’re best utilized not for monumental clashes but for silly bits like Venom turning Eddie into a multi-tentacled marionette version of Tom Cruise’s Cocktail bartender, twirling bottles, breaking glasses, and downing drinks with maniacal fervor.
Venom: The Last Dance’s tale is so underwhelming that the climactic attempt to posit it as Eddie and Venom’s grand farewell falls flat. There’s something slight about this go-round, and the de facto mid- and post-credit teases about future symbiote-centric sagas only further undercut the affair’s supposed finality. Nonetheless, if this truly is the pair’s big-screen goodbye, at least it ends on a fittingly wacko note of pure, unadulterated sentimentality—one last unexpected twist for a trilogy that, when it worked, embraced the inherent goofiness of its comic-book source material.
