Watching “Venom: The Last Dance” is like watching the superhero genre die for two hours. Right in front of you. Holding your hand. Clinging to its last shred of dignity. It doesn’t want to go. But finally, it realizes it’s time. The light goes out of its eyes. Even the closing credits stinger is sad and lonely.
This really has been a crappy year for superhero movies. The one big blockbuster, “Deadpool and Wolverine,” was an onanistic exercise in embarrassing self-promotion, having more in common with the old “That’s Entertainment” musical clip shows than a conventional feature. “Joker: Folie a Deux” was actively mad at its own audience for giving a crap about the Joker in the first place and it nailed its own coffin shut on the way out. Then there’s “Madame Web,” which took endless flack at the beginning of the year for being slapdash and modest, but was a harmless trifle in comparison to what came after.
The only great superhero movie this year was Vera Drew’s “The People’s Joker,” an independent and queer and punk rock take on Batman’s famous villains, which exists in direct defiance of a studio system that would never, ever try this hard to be that personal or push so many boundaries. The closest the studios ever came was in “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” a superhero movie about dueling polyamorous throuples who eat people’s heads and are ultimately undone by a lack of commitment to the polycule.
“Venom: The Last Dance” has no such imagination, and abandons what made the other “Venom” movies entertaining and replaces them with plot. Because that’s what people loved about those films. The plot. A few funny moments and a few weird scenes where the Venom symbiote merges with random animals are all we get of the lobster-soaking weirdness of the first two films. And it’s clear that somewhere down the line the filmmakers realized those animals were the movie’s biggest selling point, since the closing credits are full of Venom-suited fauna who didn’t appear in the movie (but clearly should have).
The third “Venom” begins with a bad guy shouting his backstory at the audience. His name is Knull, he created the Venom symbiotes, and he looks like a “Final Fantasy” villain got lost and wound up in the wrong franchise. He stays lost, too. Knull spends the entire movie in a generic and badly-lit CGI cut scene, never interacting with the characters, and making teleportation portals for his evil minions, so they can search the universe for a way to free Knull from this prison. This prison… where he does nothing but make teleportation portals. Riiiiight.
Eddie Brock and his gooey lover Venom (both played by Tom Hardy) haven’t moved since the last time we saw them. They’re still sitting at a bar and getting drunk while every other superhero has a multiverse adventure. “I’m so done with this multiverse shit,” Venom yells, before going back to his own business. Eddie is a fugitive from the law, accused of murdering Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham), who is actually alive and joined with another symbiote inside a secret government facility under Area 51. The subterranean version is actually called Area 55 for — presumably — reasons.
So Eddie decides to blackmail a corrupt judge into dropping his charges, which is a thing he can do apparently, and they hightail it to New York City. That plot goes nowhere. Along the way one of Knull’s monsters attacks them, and Venom realizes the key to releasing Knull is inside of their bodies because they died once. Don’t even try to figure it out. Now they have to escape from the cops (who never show up), escape from the government (who suck at this), and escape from Knull’s monsters, which have some kind of woodchipper in their skulls, which is admittedly a little cool.
“Venom: The Last Dance” is a road trip fugitive movie which barely works as a road trip, or as a fugitive movie, or as a movie. The whole plot revolves around Eddie and Venom, who can’t merge into one entity or else Knull’s monsters will kill them. So they avoid merging at all costs until Venom decides he wants to dance and throws all caution to the wind, for reasons which make no sense. The scene ends exactly like you’d expect it to.
If writer/director Kelly Marcel’s movie (Tom Hardy shares a “story” credit) had committed to just screwing around, it might have been entertainingly camp. Certainly the film’s best moments are when it remembers the other movies were odd, and it tries to be odd too. There’s a singalong in a car with Rhys Ifans’ hippie family — another subplot which goes nowhere, despite filling tons of screen time — and it’s almost charming. Venom taking over a fish and a frog is, as mentioned earlier, kinda cute.
But the majority of this meandering snore thinks we care about government conspiracies and alien hierarchies. Neither of which matters in the long run, because it all boils down to “symbiotes are good, Knull’s monsters are bad.” Marcel introduces us to supporting characters with one distinctive trait — not per character, but in totality — and they mostly get thrown in the wood-chipper along with all the unnecessary exposition. Juno Temple plays a scientist who has a memory of her brother getting hit by lightning, and that kinda-sorta-but-not-really comes up later, and Chiwetel Ejiofor plays such a generic “soldier who wants to just shoot things” and you can’t help wonder if the actor is still paying off his student loans. It’s difficult to imagine what else could have attracted him to this role.
“Venom: The Last Dance” really wants you to think it’s the end. Throughout the film, Venom talks about wanting to see the Statue of Liberty like a cop with two weeks until retirement talks about taking his wife on a long-delayed boat trip, right after one final case. There’s a suggestion of a sequel but it plays more like a threat: “If you see this movie we’ll make you watch another one.” So maybe let’s not. If this is what Sony thinks the “Venom” movies should be like, they can keep it. What a lousy way to say goodbye. No greatest hits. Just a strikeout.
A Sony Pictures release, “Venom: The Last Dance” opens exclusively in theaters on Oct. 25.
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