Director: Kelly Marcel Starring: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Stephen Graham Running Time: 109 minutes
When an actor reaches the zenith of their critical and commercial popularity, it can result in some truly insane passion projects. Will Smith made an alien movie with M. Night Shymalan to turn his son into a star, nearly killing the careers of all three. Bruce Willis went against type to play a cat burglar after making his name as a hard-nosed cop. Warren Beatty made a three-hour biopic of a famous American communist.
Tom Hardy, the chameleonic, accent-attempting, jiu-jitsu-contest-winning madman, chose to helm a superhero franchise where he plays a B-list Spider-Man villain made of black goo. And boy, does he play him with gusto.
After a box-office sensation with 2018’s first film and a successful sequel in 2021, Venom: The Last Dance brings to an end the trilogy and, fittingly, it is Hardy’s co-writer on the previous two films, Kelly Marcel, who directs the final entry.
The film finds Hardy’s Eddie Brock returning from the after-credit scene of a Spider-Man movie from a wholly separate series of films, which is a perfect representation of the insane convolution to come. Some helpfully-timed news bulletins inform Eddie and Venom that they are wanted fugitives after the events of the previous film, Let There Be Carnage, and they decide to make their way across the country from western Mexico to New York City to hide out (I don’t understand either).
Multiple obstacles stand in their way. The film’s Big Bad, Knull, creator of the symbiotes and would-be Thanos of the Sony Universe, has awoken from his not-so-eternal slumber in an intergalactic prison and has ordered his tentacled minions, the Xenophages, to track down the symbiotes and retrieve the Codex, a MacGuffin contained within the symbiotes, which will free Knull to unleash his bleach-blonde havoc upon the universe. The reason why the Xenophages are allowed to come and go from this prison is unclear, and it is not the only plot detail which Marcel’s script slinks past like a creeping alien goo. After featuring in an exposition-heavy prologue, Knull goes on to have negligible impact on the remainder of the story.
Eddie also encounters a military research group called Imperium who are based in Area 55, underneath the famous Area 51. The group is led by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Strickland, a military general who is Tired Of These Damn Aliens™, and Juno Temple’s Dr. Payne, a scientist with an utterly insane backstory involving being struck by lightning. Having accrued all of the other non-Venom symbiotes, they seek to study them, and also to inject them into Stephen Graham so that they can talk to them. Strickland and Payne’s relationship is wildly inconsistent from scene to scene, with Ejiofor alternating between “we’re-a-team” camaraderie and treating Temple and her Christmas-loving assistant like they’re egghead freaks interfering with his important job of blowing up aliens.
The original Venom, despite its smash box-office success, is a slog of a watch, wholly reliant on Hardy’s madcap performance to keep it from being in league with Sony’s Morbius. The sequel wisely shifted focus to Eddie and Venom, treating them like a bickering romcom couple for laughs, Tracy and Hepburn if the latter was an alien made of black goo. Marcel and Hardy’s story concept of ‘Eddie and Venom roadtrip movie’ shows an understanding of the critical success of Carnage’s tone, and when the film commits to that aspect, it’s a fun ride. Hardy shares a VW van with a hippy family headed by Rhys Ifans’ alien-obsessed patriarch, making for some good laughs, and there’s also a Vegas sequence where Venom plays the slots and dances in a penthouse. Hardy, as always, is game for all of the film’s silliest moments, including a Hugh Jackman-esque joke about him once being named Sexiest Man Alive.
Unfortunately, most of the rest is unintelligible nonsense of a brand viewers have become all-too-familiar with in Sony movies. Exposition cascades into every scene like an avalanche. Dialogue is bafflingly un-human with characters stating their aims and biographies like children introducing themselves to a substitute teacher. The villain is strikingly ineffective after the first scene. The Xenophages (part-octopus, part-scorpion and part-woodchipper) are fun monsters and provide a surprising and enjoyable amount of gore given the film’s 12A rating, but they are mostly shot with the same CGI-grey and whirlwind of arcing camera angles as the worst of this genre.
Heading towards the end, many may be anticipating the introduction of Spider-Man. It gives me no pleasure to report that neither Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield or Tom Holland makes an appearance. And therein lies the key failure of Sony’s experiment. Giving a host of second-tier Spider-Man characters their own films is a fine idea in principle, but if you leave out their main adversary, their raison d’ȇtre, and make them fight poorly-written, disposable villains, there’s only a certain level of success the films can achieve, and the diminishing returns since the first Venom film speaks for itself. Perhaps if the filmmakers and studio had been willing to lean into the silliness of the characters (as in Let There Be Carnage) and remove the now-standard showdown with a dour, world-ending villain, they could have forged their own path in the genre. Based on the trailer for Aaron Taylor Johnson’s much-delayed Kraven the Hunter, a change in tone seems unlikely at this point.
The biggest question now will be: what’s next for Tom Hardy after leaving the franchise he has been committed to almost exclusively for six years? If his future performances are half as committed as his commitment to being a jerky, dishevelled weirdo in Venom: The Last Dance, we have many great things yet to see from him.
(2 / 5)