Venom - The Last Dance: Movie Review

All good things end, and this movie marks the final curtain of Tom Hardy playing Venom, the iconic anti-hero character from the Spider-Man comic universe. The final instalment of this trilogy is titled "Venom: The Last Dance", and that's pretty much what it is — one last song to end a fun night.

Despite the ongoing struggles with interconnecting storylines between different intellectual properties across Sony and Marvel (aka Disney), the Venom saga finds itself infected with the same virus of lazy storywriting with another lame attempt at recreating the kind of synergy achieved in the core Avengers films. As the finale to a rather well-received trilogy that debuted in 2018, this one needed a strong story but all the elements feel discordant. There is little to tie it all together and the only saving grace for the movie is the performance of Tom Hardy as both Eddie Brock and Venom (yes, he delivers the voice of the bombastic symbiote himself which gets punched up for that added alien vibe, I looked into it).

We are also introduced to characters that are new entrants to this standalone franchise. Chiwetel Ejiofor is criminally underutilised as Rex Strickland, Stephen Graham acts as the living corpse of Detective Mulligan, Peggy Lu makes a returning cameo as Mrs Chen, and Rhys Ifans plays an alien-obsessed hippy dad called Martin. The biggest casting addition for this one is Juno Temple as Dr Teddy Paine, whose only acting note seems to be to suck the life out of any scene she is in, and does that quite well. We also have Clark Backo putting in a half-decent performance as Sadie, who works under Teddy. Revealing any more will count as spoilers, so we'll come to those later.

The trailer already reveals that the new threat for Venom 3 is another life from the home of the symbiotes, and we see it quite clearly in the trailer as well. There's a bit of Transformers (the first Bay one), Alien (the Scott one), and Avatar (the Cameron one) for this new foe in design and capability.  But of course, after the events of the previous movies, Eddie himself is a fugitive and doesn't have many friends among the humans either.

The odd-couple energy between Eddie and Venom gets amplified in this trilogy finale as it seems like he has lost his intellectual edge thanks to the doggo-energy symbiote living in his brain. He seems weary of not being in charge of his motor functions as Venom takes over and sprouts extra tentacles to do whatever, whenever. Yet, they are the best of friends and truly feel incomplete without each other. We are treated to some MCU references sprinkled in, with a decent helping of meta references to other movies from our reality, such as the Tom Cruise joke from the trailer. There are weak connections and references to the existence of Spider-Man, none of which lead to anything fruitful thus leaving the audience hanging from a web of lies.

There are plenty of good action sequences packed in Venom 3 but they lack cohesive choreography. While there's nothing to complain about the visual quality, it feels like a missed opportunity that they did not do more with the advancements in VFX since 2018. Of course, the soundtrack is another bonus for this movie but for whatever reason, they don't use the original "Venom" song as released by Eminem.

Overall, "Venom: The Final Dance" is yet another fan-service superhero movie that will not garner the studio many new fans, but will allow the rest of us to bid farewell to perhaps the best version of the character that will ever be produced in live-action form. I remember Venom as the scariest villain from 'The Amazing Spiderman' cartoon TV show that I used to watch, a villain often defeated by his internal conflicts rather than outright power and ability. You know the character is overpowered when they have their own "kryptonite", in this case, high-frequency sound waves and monsters from the edge of the universe. But Tom Hardy made us look past the menacing half-split smiling face of the alien Symbiote, and fall in love with Venom.

I have some very particular issues with Venom 3 that I would like to voice before giving it my final score, so be warned...

...SPOILERS AHEAD.

We knew from the first movie that Venom is a member of a species that gets named Symbiotes. So, there's more where he came from, including an origin. In Venom 3, we get to see more such characters, with ties to the comic books, some directly, others not so much. You know how I mentioned that this movie makes a lazy and lame attempt to recreate the magic of the original Avengers? That's where it happens. The final third of the movie, apart from the action, is lacking any story as we see a multicolour of symbiotes showcase some cool ability but without any explanation, only to be killed off a few minutes later by the Xenophage which is like a wood-chipper-come-to-life that gets rid of living things. Why? We don't need 6 different characters on screen at once, ones that we have no emotional background with, and yet they suddenly are willing to sacrifice themselves for our hero. Is there a Zack Snyder-style director's cut with another 25 minutes of film we should expect for a Blu-Ray release? I mean, it's just shoddy writing.

Then there's the ending. It's definitely a heartfelt goodbye to this duo but feels disorganized amidst the chaos of the fighting and the new characters. I am willing to bet that there will be a new instalment (movie or OTT show) based on the female survivor from the whole battle who becomes the new lead to appease a target audience, and the studio is going to just ruin it with poor writing and a lower CGI budget. The main villain himself, Knull, is showcased but in a WoW kind of animated form to offer some backstory but it does nothing to create intrigue or excitement for a future movie. They even give him his own post-credit scene, another element that has the Avengers imprint all over it.

*SPOILERS OVER*

With all that taken into account, I am giving "Venom: The Last Dance", a generous seven out of ten Mini Snickers, mainly for Tom Hardy's performance. If I had to be objective, this movie is only 5 chocolates out of 10.