Venom: The Last Dance’s Superpower Is Its Sincerity
Here's to the ones that we got.
The Venom movies are absurd. An unwitting journalist (Tom Hardy) is possessed by a gooey black symbiote (also Hardy), which causes him to flail about wildly as though maneuvered by a rowdy puppeteer. Since the alien’s constant chattering blares into his mind, but remains largely out of view, his attempts to communicate with it appear to onlookers as the crazed rantings and ravings of a man talking to himself. It’s a bizarre premise, which the actor’s gonzo performance fully exploits for moments of verbal and physical comedy across the three-film franchise. Recall him jumping into a restaurant’s lobster tank for a live midday snack, or delivering phrases like, “...like a turd in the wind,” as Venom describes, with great relish, how he plans to leave one hapless victim.
For all their absurdity, however, these films are also absurdly sincere, wringing genuine sentiment from the partnership between their two leads who share one body. The first Venom film saw them realize their fractious alliance could also be a mutually beneficial one, while its sequel made the homoerotic subtext of their arrangement, well, text. (Following a “breakup” scene, the symbiote attends a rave, declaring he’s now “out of the Eddie closet.”) It’s played for laughs, but the undeniable force of their bond isn’t lost on anyone. If Venom needs Eddie to survive, then Venom has also brought Eddie back to life, as Venom: The Last Dance points out. Hardy’s wholehearted commitment to the bit doesn’t hurt either. Since 2018, Venom and Eddie’s blend of childish petulance and world-weariness make them ideal sparring partners, and The Last Dance derives its undercurrent of sadness from the idea that this might be the last time we ever see them tango.
The film’s incarcerated villain, Knull (Andy Serkis), seeks a “codex,” or a key that exists only within Eddie and Venom’s combined form, which sets up the prospect of one of them dying by the end. The world-ending stakes, a dime-a-dozen in superhero movies, aren’t particularly novel in The Last Dance — the real gut-punch of this movie is that its characters, on a road trip for most of it, have come to the end of their journey.
A sense of finality suffuses the movie, rare for franchise films that are often so preoccupied with future installments. By contrast, for all its talk of aliens and space, The Last Dance locates great tenderness in Venom’s wide-eyed wonder of the Earth and all its beauty, from his insistence on taking in the view even while on the run, to his wistful realization that he could’ve had a wonderful life here. The fugitives find safe passage with Martin Moon (Rhys Ifans), a hippie whose sincere belief in aliens reflects Hardy’s clear affection for the one he embodies — both The Last Dance and its prequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) are based on stories the actor co-wrote with screenwriter Kelly Marcel.
In crucial moments of tragedy, the camera returns to Venom’s expressive face — even rows of razor sharp teeth and pupil-less eyes can’t detract from the heartbreak that comes through. It’s also what makes the film’s fatal sacrifice hit hard. The familiar rasp of Hardy’s Venom voicework is one of the franchise’s many delights, and to hear Eddie call out to his partner by the end, without the certainty of a response for once, only amplifies the sense of loneliness.
A glimpse at some of the memories during The Last Dance’s final montage.
Towards the end, Eddie visits the Statue of Liberty alone, fulfilling Venom’s long-held desire on his behalf. (The monument, meant to welcome immigrants to America, is a fun nod to Venom himself being an immigrant.) A montage, recapping years of their friendship, is so tremendously earnest, you almost expect a wisecrack or comedic beat to follow, undercutting it: the result of years of conditioning from the MCU. Just think of 2021’s Black Widow, in which Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) is only given seconds to mourn at her sister’s grave before being rudely interrupted by the sound of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) blowing her nose.
Instead, in making us feel for these characters, and the way they feel about each other, The Last Dance also makes us feel the weight of their loss. The film suffers from many of the same problems most modern comic-book movies do — an overstuffed plot, a disposable CGI villain, flat and uninspired visuals. Unlike those films, however, it’s drenched in sentiment as gooey as its titular symbiote. And a little of that goes a long way.
