Venom: The Last Dance Loses Sight of the Franchise’s Greatest Strength
Not enough dancing.
Midway through Venom: The Last Dance, Eddie and Venom find themselves at the end of their rope. They’re fugitives from the law, with no money and no shoes. But even at their lowest point, Venom’s sheer joy at being in Las Vegas is infectious, resulting in one of the funniest moments of the movie. After boasting about his alien-enhanced gambling skills, Venom instantly loses all their money to a glimmering slot machine. The scene only gets better when their old friend Mrs. Chen appears, glammed up and delighted to tear up the town with Eddie/Venom. But suddenly, the film cuts away to an underground bunker where a dour-faced Chiwetel Ejiofor swears vengeance on symbiotes. An audience member in my screening whispers a sad, “No, go back!” but, unfortunately, there’s no going back to the fun and silly Venom we used to know.
The Venom movies have always been, to borrow an internet slang term, very unserious. A glorified exercise in Tom Hardy doing weird voices, the franchise reached pseudo-cult status once fans embraced the queer undertones of the relationship between Eddie Brock and his outrageous alien symbiote. While Venom’s status as a camp icon was an accidental byproduct of the first film, the second, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, leaned into it. Sadly, the third and final entry of the franchise, Venom: The Last Dance, decides to inexplicably get serious, and in the process, loses the silly, campy spark that made the Venom movies such a weird joy to watch.
Eddie and Venom have become inseparable buddies by the time of The Last Dance.
Venom: The Last Dance picks up immediately after the events of Let There Be Carnage, with Eddie and Venom now fugitives from the law after the apparent murder of Detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham) is pinned on them. After a short stint in the MCU (the post-credits scene teased in both Let There Be Carnage and Spider-Man No Way Home) goes nowhere, they’re brought back to their universe where they find themselves pursued by a terrifying creature sent by Knull, the all-powerful creator of Venom and other symbiotes like him. Once upon a time, the symbiotes banded together to imprison Knull for eternity, but he’s now woken up and hell-bent on conquering the universe. The only thing he needs to do so is a powerful object known as a Codex which, luck will have it, is inside Eddie and Venom. Now pursued on all sides by the feds, Knull’s monsters, and a military operation experimenting with symbiotes underneath Area 51, Eddie and Venom decide to do the only logical thing: go to New York City.
All the ingredients needed for a wacky road trip movie featuring Eddie and Venom are here — The Last Dance even throws in a subplot involving a hippie alien conspiracist family led by Rhys Ifans — but the script, penned by director Kelly Marcel, who wrote the first two Venom films, keeps getting waylaid by its dull military B-plot. The clandestine operation, working out of Area 51 days before it’s set to be decommissioned, has been capturing symbiotes and researching their purpose. After saving Mulligan’s (a character you definitely remember) life by binding him to a symbiote, they learn the truth about Knull and his scheme to destroy the universe.
The Last Dance desperately needed more scenes like the goofy subplot involving Mrs. Chen.
The Last Dance gives way too much screentime to this subplot, which has a wildly different, far more serious, tone than the rest of the movie. The leaders of the operation, Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple) and General Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), grimly move through the beats of a save-the-world mission, with the movie giving much lip service to Teddy’s grief over the loss of her NASA-loving brother and Rex Strickland’s anger over his men loss to the symbiote hunt. This plot takes precedence over Eddie and Venom in many ways, and the film immediately starts to drag whenever we cut away from whatever shenanigans the pair have got up to. Temple and Ejiofor, to their credit, give perhaps the most sincere performances out of the entire Venom franchise, but still feel wildly out of place alongside the delightful moments like Venom and Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) doing a choreographed dance to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”
The Last Dance is not without its classic Eddie/Venom moments. The film kicks off (after a lengthy exposition dump from Knull and his island of misfit monsters) with a hilarious scene in which Venom attempts to make a cocktail while Eddie nurses the worst hangover of his life. That seems to be the rhythm of The Last Dance. Whenever the movie’s momentum starts to get bogged down by too much exposition about magical MacGuffins or its dour military plot, the film does us a solid and gives us another magical Eddie and Venom hijink. Venom loves gambling! Venom enthusiastically sings along to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” while Eddie dies of embarrassment! Venom and Eddie sneak into a casino while making Thelma and Louise and Rain Man references! Venom horse! Each of these moments is so delightful they almost distract from the fact that the rest of the movie doesn’t match up to it. But this slow doling out of hilarious Eddie/Venom nuggets feels less gratifying and more patronizing — as if they’re an afterthought to the real plot.
Though both give dedicated performances, Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s plotline is a snooze.
As the film trudges along, it feels like The Last Dance has been dangling this much more entertaining movie in front of us the entire time — one in which Eddie and Venom take a wacky road trip to New York, along with an even wackier detour to Las Vegas — without ever giving us what we want. By the time the movie climaxes in yet another CGI slugfest — featuring a host of new supporting characters that can only be described as the Symbiote Shazam Family — it feels like two incomplete movies coming together for an underwhelming finale.
When you look at it holistically, Venom: The Last Dance is the most competently made movie of the trilogy. It doesn’t have the made-by-committee messiness of Venom, nor the nonsensical plot of Let There Be Carnage. It has high stakes, both personal and of the universe-saving kind. But it forgets that the joy of these Venom movies is how they thrive in chaos, as if they’re cobbled together from the camera rolling too long as Tom Hardy improvises his weirdest impression of Terrence Howard.
Venom: The Last Dance is a movie that constantly gets in its own way, prioritizing plot over Venom/Eddie shenanigans. Despite some truly hysterical flashes of brilliance littered throughout, The Last Dance is a disappointingly grim farewell to the Venom franchise.
