When I reviewed Venom: Let There Be Carnage in 2021, I noted that it was an entirely overwhelming sequel that was unpretentious and, due to its absolute ludicrousness, never boring. Some of that sentiment can be shared for Venom: The Last Dance, the supposedly (and hopefully) final instalment in this surprisingly fertile series that is, once again, bombastically overwhelming but, sadly, too moronic for it to earn the emotional weight it clearly wants to project.
Tom Hardy has always given his entire being to the dual role of defamed journalist Eddie Brock and his alien alter-ego Venom, and The Last Dance is no exception, but the actor – and the characters – deserve so much better than the garbage we see before us here. The exposition is aggressive throughout Kelly Marcel‘s script – working off a story idea from herself and Hardy – and it doesn’t help that from the get-go, said exposition is immediately sprouted off from the film’s villain, who is ultimately someone we never learn anything about, nor even see their face. Not a great sign, and, sadly, it only gets worse from there.
Underwhelming villains have always been something that have plagued their share of comic book movies – whether it’s DC or Marvel, both the Sony and Disney handlings – and we could probably forgive such a nothing character if what took place across the remaining of the film’s 109 minutes was fun. And Hardy letting loose has always been something of a safety net for the Venom films, so one would assume that fun is to be had. You’d think so.
Fun in the so-bad sense is here, without question, as we see Venom “infect” a horse, there’s a sort-of fight sequence atop a 747, there’s a running gag involving Eddie’s ability to keep losing his shoes, and there’s Juno Temple playing a doctor of sorts with an apparently important backstory involving being struck by lightning that we’re supposed to care about. It’s all so nonsensical – and Temple’s performance is comedically bad – and erratically edited that there’s never a chance for us to really process what has taken place. This thing could be so-bad-its-good if it bothered to let us bask in its stupidity.
Speaking of stupidity, cranking up the temperament of the sequel’s rave club scene, which very much indicated a sort-of homosexual undercurrent to Venom’s being, here we get an entirely unnecessary dancing sequence between Venom and the long-running side-character Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) in a Las Vegas hotel room that adds nothing more than a cheap “laugh”, as well as the odd addition of Rhys Ifans as an alien-chasing hippie, Martin Moon, which isn’t odd from a character point-of-view, but because Ifans already has a presence in the Sony Universe as Dr. Curt Connors (The Amazing Spider-Man, Spider-Man: No Way Home). And this isn’t a case of a personality shift due to the multi-verse.
To be fair, messiness has kind of always been an ingredient the Venom films have embraced with open arms, but The Last Dance is downright sloppy. The tonal inconsistencies of childish teen humour with darker violence were mostly forgiven in the first film, before growing as an issue with the sequel. The Last Dance, right down to its embarrassing lamenting Maroon 5 love song over a “couple” montage between Eddie and Venom, is a full-blown circumstance of disparity. The Last Dance is fitting, and it’s a real shame these steps are as misguided as they are during this routine.
ONE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Venom: The Last Dance is now screening in Australian theatres.
