Run-of-the-mill mediocrity is par for the course in American studio filmmaking in general and comic-book adaptations in particular. But a film like Venom: The Last Dance is so confoundingly ridiculous that it takes mediocrity to another level; narrative cinema rarely cares this little about actual narrative, transforming what’s supposed to be the concluding chapter of an ongoing saga into little more than pure sensation — blobs of color, bursts of sound.
This is one of those rare terrible movies where garbage and art rub elbows. And then blow things up.
Are we meant to care that journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is a fugitive on the run for a murder he didn’t commit? Or that his parasitic alien twin Venom is also fleeing, but from some vaguely-defined intergalactic menace? Not really, as far as this threequel is concerned; the screenplay by director Kelly Marcel (who collaborated with Hardy on the “story”) can’t be bothered to provide stakes or emotion. It’s laden with cardboard characters like “scientist living out her dead twin’s dream” (played by Juno Temple), “military guy who wants to kill all the aliens, whatever their intentions might be” (Chiwitel Ejiofor), and, uh, “scientist who wears a Christmas-tree pin year-round, and that’s her entire character” (Clark Backo, Letterkenny).
We open on a murky planet where an ill-defined villain (voiced by Andy Serkis), who resembles Jack Skellington with a Legolas wig, remains imprisoned by the symbiotes (which include Venom) he once created. This villain can’t escape their cage, but he can send a bunch of Ghostbusters devil dogs to the far reaches of the universe to find the codex that will release him, and the only symbiotes with a codex are the ones that have saved the life of their host body, and… The act of writing this down just makes it all even more ridiculous.
Anyway, blah blah blah, Area 51 scientists, and Rhys Ifans and Alanna Ubach as UFO tourists, and Tom Hardy strutting through a Vegas casino in a tuxedo (he’s one of the best 007s we never got to have), and an ABBA dance number, and a bunch of multi-colored symbiotes, and explosion explosion explosion.
2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage at least had the good taste to whiz by at a breezy 97 minutes, and while The Last Dance retains much of its predecessor’s cavalier attitude toward storytelling, it wears out its welcome at nearly two hours, wriggling and jiggling and struggling with a manic and garbled jokiness, trying to divert your attention from its empty core. At the same time, those blobs of color and bursts of sound aren’t entirely without entertainment value.
Connoisseurs of American accents from UK actors will have a field day here, with Hardy, Temple, Ejiofor, Ifans (a vet of the Sony Spider-Man movies, having played the Vulture in Andrew Garfield’s first outing), and Stephen Graham all delivering top-shelf, often region-free, Yank intonations. Their performances are generally effective, yet there’s that sense that all of them are just killing time until Steve McQueen or Andrea Arnold comes calling.
The Venom films have always resisted taking themselves seriously: Hardy maintains an “I can hardly believe this, and you shouldn’t either” expression on his face, but the comedic rapport between Eddie and Venom (also voiced by Hardy) constitutes the main selling point here. No one went to the Road movies for the intricate storytelling — they just wanted to watch Bob Hope and Bing Crosby banter with each other and flirt with Dorothy Lamour. Hardy can be Hope, Crosby, and Lamour when he has a mind to, but surely in the future there will be less inane frameworks that will allow him to share those attributes.
Director: Kelly Marcel
Screenwriter: Kelly Marcel; story by Tom Hardy & Kelly Marcel; Venom created by Todd MacFarlane and David Michelinie
Cast: Tom Hardy, Juno Temple, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rhys Ifans, Alanna Ubach, Stephen Graham, Cristo Fernández
Producers: Avi Arad, Tom Hardy, Kelly Marcel, Hutch Parker, Amy Pascal, Matt Tolmach
Executive producer: Joseph M. Caracciolo, Jr.
Director of photography: Fabian Wagner
Production design: Sean Haworth, Chris Lowe
Costume design: Daniel Orlandi
Editing: Mark Sanger
Music: Dan Deacon
Sound design: Ando Deacon, sound designer; Darren “Sunny” Warkentin, supervising sound editor
Production companies: Columbia Pictures, Marvel, Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, Pascal Pictures, Marcel Hardy
In English
109 minutes
