“Venom” the last dance.
Review.
DirectorKelly Marcel
WritersKelly Marcel, Tom Hardy
StarsTom Hardy, Juno Temple, Alanna Ubach, Stephen Graham, Rhys Ifans
‘Venom: The Last Dance’ Review: A Long and Winding Tongue
Playing both Eddie Brock and the alien parasite who possesses him, Tom Hardy
gives another roiling one-man-band of a performance in this third
installment of the franchise.
A dark creature sticks out his very large tongue.
A scene from “Venom: The Last Dance.”Credit…Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures
By Amy Nicholson
Action, Adventure,
With the 2018 film “Venom,” Tom Hardy locked himself
into a three-picture deal, giving his time, talents and torso to this saga about a
man named Eddie Brock possessed by a fanged, body-snatching alien
parasite named Venom who pops in and out of his skin like a hyper-violent prairie dog. The overly plotted
“Venom: The Last Dance,” written and directed by Kelly Marcel, concludes the trilogy by hammering home
all that Eddie has sacrificed to merge with this impulsive, smack-talking
goo blob. In the first movie, Eddie was an ambitious San Francisco investigative
journalist with a fiancée played by Michelle Williams; here, he’s a filthy drifter on a Mexican bender who’s lost
his career, his woman and his reputation. Forced to go on the lam to flee a murder accusation, Eddie makes a running joke out of the fact
that he can’t even hang on to a pair of shoes.
In glimpses, this is a drama
about a drunk who finds himself unbearably lonely despite being conjoined
with a garrulous monster. Hardy voices both reedy Eddie and gravelly Venom and his roiling
one-man-band of a performance continues to be the only reason to keep up with the films. Highlights here include the herky-jerky
chaos Eddie/Venom causes as he mixes a Michelada while grooving to “Tequila,” and the moment when he’s suctioned to the fuselage of
an airplane like a Garfield plushie and sighs, “It is so unpleasantly cold.” Eddie and Venom even detour to
Las Vegas, the capital city of self-destruction, and dub themselves Thelma and Louise.
But these mild pleasures are overwhelmed by a barrage of underdeveloped
supporting characters — Chiwetel Ejiofor as a general, Juno Temple and Clark Backo as Area 51 scientists, a hippy family headed by Rhys Ifans — plus
a nifty spidery nasty who gobbles its victims like a scuttling wood chipper and, when sliced up, stitches its
long limbs back together. There’s also a barely introduced major villain named Knull (Andy Serkis, the director of 2021’s
“Venom: Let There Be Carnage”) who seems to exist only so that the studio can bridge this finale to
some other future comic book flick.
Honestly, I’d rather watch Eddie and Venom dicker
over pizza toppings than team up for something as banal as saving the planet. Yet, this film prefers the
latter and the bombastic battle scenes that come with it. Marcel, making her directorial debut, claws
toward a strong emotional climax that’s undercut by a post-credits sequence which implies that
everything our heroes just endured didn’t matter at all. The mechanics of the
Marvel Machine must keep on cranking.
The film fills time with sequences set to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” David
Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Abba’s “Dancing Queen,” plus a winkingly sentimental montage of Eddie and Venom
that unspools over a Maroon 5 ballad. These spliced-together bits from all three films salute the dopey screwball comedy
the franchise hit in its best moments — and, even more
so, feel like a toast to the end of Hardy’s contractual agreement. great action
adventure symbiotic with moments that are sweet funny unconditional and movie…
