Sony has had a pretty bad run managing their sole Marvel character license, Spider-Man, with the high points like the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and Across the Spiderverse weighed down by the lackluster Amazing Spider-Man pair of movies. It got so dire that they relented to allow Spidey to join the MCU in Captain America: Civil War and basically outsourced production of solo movies to Marvel resulting in Homecoming/Far From Home/No Way Home trilogy which augmented Tom Holland's Peter Parker with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), and Doctor Strange (Bernadette Cumberbund) and appearances in the last two Avengers movies.
But the license also gave Sony the rights to make movies with Spider-Man adjacent villains and anti-heroes which has led to a trio of absolute disasters - Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter - but also a mysteriously successful run of movies featuring Spidey's symbiote nemesis Venom. Beginning with 2018's Venom, which was OK, and continuing with 2021's noisy & bad Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the trilogy concludes with Venom: The Last Dance which is slightly better than its title and substantially better than the last entry.
After a bewildering cold-open info dump which sets up this movie's Big Bad, Knull (Andy Serkis), and the gobbledygook MacGuffin called the Codex (super original name there) which would free him to destroy the Universe (because no one just wants to rule the Upper East Side), we catch up with Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) who is temporarily hanging out in our Earth-616 universe thanks to Doctor Strange's spell in No Way Home. Tossed back into his correct universe, he finds he is internationally and wrongly wanted for murder related to events in the last movie.
While literally hitching a ride on the outside of a jet airliner, Eddie/Venom attract an attack by a Xenophage sent by Knull to get the Codex which is formed and acts like a homing beacon when they go into full Venom form. When it's just tentacles or a head popping from Eddie's body, fine; but when he's Venom, ruh roh. And the only way to destroy the Codex is for Eddie or Venom to die.
After escaping the plane encounter, they are beset upon by an the forces of Gen. Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor, this character was written as a white guy, wasn't he?) who is trying to eradicate the symbiotes. Only when the Xenophage eats the soldiers are they able to escape again, which makes them even less popular with Strickland.
Trekking though the Nevada wilderness they encounter a hippie family traveling in a VW van (what else?) headed by Martin Moon (Rhys Ifans) who are heading to Area 51 to see it before it gets decommissioned and offers to drop Eddie off in Las Vegas where the conveniently encounter Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), the convenience store owner from the first two movies, who is such a high roller they've comped her a suite where they can go and dance to ABBA's "Dancing Queen" while Venom attracts the Xenophage and Strickland's forces to capture them and wait, what the heck is going on here?!? Why did they go full metal Venom when they know it attracts bad monsters with bad goals?
It all ends up in your typical third act VFX overload with lots of monsters and mayhem and a very predictable ending which was foreshadowed from the first moments at Area 51. Writer Kelly Marcel, who came up with the story with Hardy and also steps into the director's chair after co-writing the first and solo writing the second movies, has come up with a lumpy, disjointed string of scenes and events which never really gels into a coherent story. Details are focused on which either set up obvious payoffs or never amount to anything, feeling like there's a lot of footage that got cut to bring it down to a manageable 109 minutes. And Knull is a terrible Big Bad because he comes from nowhere in the series mythology & is just Serkis doing his Snoke voice again.
Hardy is his usual twitchy self as Eddie who never really seems at peace with his co-pilot, but it's his gonzo vocal performance as Venom (he actually does the voice with audio processing to make it sound more alien) and the only thing that kept me engaged with the story was Venom's running commentary as when Martin hands Eddie a tray of vegan food, saying that "nothing died on this plate," and Eddie hurls it away while Venom barks (internally), "HARD PASS!" - the only thing that spares the movie from getting a similar review.
On the audio-visual front, the 4K HDR grade is above average with bright, punchy colors and good detail. The audio track is also good with the rumbling symbiote and Knull voices having a meaty low-end.
The Venom series has always been lower second tier comic book fare, but compared to the mess of most of Sony's Spiderverse efforts have been, it's the tallest pygmy in Borneo.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
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