‘Venom: The Last Dance’: Review

Dir: Kelly Marcel. US. 2024. 109mins 

Tom Hardy’s beleaguered journalist and his symbiote best friend go on the run in Venom: The Last Dance, which leans hard on the franchise’s two strengths: its goofy sense of humour and its big heart. Although often characterised as a superhero series with horror elements, the trilogy has mostly played out as an oddball buddy comedy – and this purported final chapter follows that formula to intermittently entertaining effect.

This trilogy is probably ending at the right time

The Last Dance pits our heroes against their most formidable foe yet — an ancient alien evil that wants to destroy everything in its path — but what works best is the dopey charm of Hardy opposite his CGI sidekick. Their grouchy rapport is almost enough to make up for a slapdash script and some predictable genre elements.

Sony unveils The Last Dance in the UK and US on October 25, looking to end the trilogy on a commercial high note. But the 2018 original’s $856 million gross seems out of reach, and initial tracking suggests that the new film may even have trouble matching the $507 million collected by 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Nonetheless, there is no comic-book competition in sight, which should help theatrical prospects. 

Eddie (Hardy) is in hiding after the events of Let There Be Carnage with the alien symbiote Venom (voiced by Hardy) still attached to him. But once they learn that authorities are looking to arrest Eddie for a murder he did not commit, the duo decides to get on the road to escape detection. Unbeknownst to the pair, though, a terrifying alien — a sibling of sorts to Venom and his fellow symbiotes — has arrived to find Eddie and Venom, who hold the key to unlocking an unfathomable power.

Writer Kelly Marcel, who wrote or co-wrote the previous Venom picture, makes her feature directorial debut here. Not surprisingly, then, The Last Dance feels like a thematic continuation, with the film building toward a finale that is far less open-ended than most blockbusters. There is also a noticeable melancholy that starts to weave through The Last Dance, despite the usual amounts of slapstick silliness and Eddie and Venom’s smart-aleck banter.

By now, audiences know what to expect from these two characters, with Eddie eternally frustrated by Venom’s impulsive, violent behaviour, and Hardy again attacks his dual role with comic abandon. But even if Eddie and Venom’s odd-couple shtick has grown familiar, Marcel injects enough surprisingly sweet moments that it’s clear that she and Hardy, who also worked on the story, are invested in this bizarre, unexpectedly touching bromance.

Unfortunately, the plot has not enjoyed the same amount of care. The Last Dance is simply the latest superhero flick in which a boringly indestructible enemy seeks to rule the universe, leading to a typically overblown third-act showdown. Likewise, this sequel’s new supporting characters are unoriginal types, including Chiwetel Ejiofor as Strickland, a gruff US general determined to eliminate Eddie and Venom. Juno Temple plays Teddy, a conscientious scientist who believes symbiotes should be studied, not killed. She is saddled with a tritely tragic backstory that is awkwardly shoehorned into the action-packed ending, but the hoped-for emotional wallop never develops.

What has made this franchise refreshing is its irreverence, and a refusal to be squeaky-clean family entertainment in the same vein as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (With Disney owning many of the starriest Marvel properties, Sony has adapted lesser secondary characters it controls, such as Venom, Morbius and Madame Web.) Venom’s rude humour, edgier tone and cartoon-like mayhem were never particularly sophisticated, but Hardy’s madcap gusto gives that film and its sequels a combustible energy. In addition, Eddie’s growing fondness for this uncouth symbiote opened the door to an appealing sentimentality once these two outcasts formed a de facto family. 

The Last Dance demonstrates how that mixture of sassy and earnest can be fun, but both the tepid action scenes and mediocre plot twists suggest that this trilogy is probably ending at the right time. The Venom effects are still nicely rendered, but the punchlines are a little shopworn, although this franchise’s penchant for truly bonkers sequences has not diminished. (A dance sequence set in Las Vegas is so superfluous that it’s almost endearing.) Eddie and Venom remain feisty company but, as they hit the road for this final chapter, it is soon apparent that they don’t really have anywhere else to go.