Venom: The Last Dance (2024)
Sony has a long history of struggling to come up with anything of note with their Spider-man licenses. Giving up hope for the main webhead to have a good movie after the performances of Marc Webb’s two Amazing Spider-man movies, they turned to making a deal with Disney to bring him into the MCU. Most of these Spider-man related films work well. This left Sony to their own devices with the smaller Spier-man related characters and, outside the animated side of things, the output has been less than stellar. Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage are not the best movies ever made, but Tom Hardy’s electric and passionate performance as Eddie Brock and the Venom symbiote. However, the other two films Sony has produced of its Spider-man properties, Morbius and Madam Web, have been lackluster both as films and money-making ventures. Venom: The Last Dance is Hardy’s swan song to the character, while also being a jumping-off point to expand the Sony Spider-verse wider. Neither one of these is fully successful.
After an opening introducing Knull and the origin of the symbiote in a muddy CGI scene, Venom: The Last Dance gets us right into the action where Eddie Brock and Venom at the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home. He is in the MCU universe trying to wrap his head around Thanos, before being pulled back into his universe. One messy margarita later, he’s on his way to kill a gang of dog fighters. The banter between Eddie and Venom is fun and a good time and I think this initial fight scene is one of the best in the trilogy. Giving the audience that full-on hero moment we thought this whole movie would be. Right after this moment, the film introduces us to the b-plot of the film.
The government is of course investigating the symbiotes and the mission is led by Strickland (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Dr. Teddy Paine (played by Juno Temple). Both are just fine in this film, but the whole military subplot is a waste of time and sucks a lot of the screen time away from Eddie and Venom. The film has two masters in a sense trying to be respectful to Hardy (the main driver behind the films) and giving Sony its cake while eating it too by setting up the threat of Knull. The movie isn’t long enough or has enough story worth telling to support these two tasks. It then isn’t sure what exactly to do with Eddie and Venom at one point and sticks them with a hippie family (having the parents played by Rhys Ifans & Alanna Ubach), but these characters do next to nothing to really support the themes or even the plot happening around Eddie. They end up being just fodder for the third act.
The movie is directed by Kelly Marcel, who is also the writer of the whole trilogy. She’s a long-time producing partner to Hardy and I don’t think there is anything with her directing or writing that is inherently bad, but what I think is bad is how much you can feel the hand of Sony stirring the pot in the process. There is next to nothing but setup throughout the film with only brief moments of payoffs. Even adding Mrs. Chen (played by Peggy Lu) back is funny for a moment, but the movie does not spend enough time to make it mean much of anything other than a cameo.
At the end of the day, I don’t have much more to say about Venom: The Last Dance. I just have frustrations with the modern studio system leaning to milk IP and build universes to cash in on sunk costs from the audiences. I think a lot of audiences are starting to wake up to this game and they’re not buying it anymore. At least, I can hope for that. I just wish this final film did Hardy some justice since you can read plenty on how passionate he is about this franchise. He deserves at least that. -4/10
