'Venom: The Last Dance' Review: A Surprisingly Potent Blend of Silliness and Sentimentality

Director: Kelly Marcel
Writer: Kelly Marcel 
Cast: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Stephen Graham, Peggy Lu, Clark Backo
Language: English

Much like the symbiote-host partnership at the heart of its trilogy, the Venom films themselves have always been somewhat of an odd but ultimately charming fusion, attempting to strike a balance between deadly seriousness and sheer absurdity. This is a franchise that gives its villains plenty of room to deliver monologues of Shakespearean gravitas, like Carlton Drake’s (Riz Ahmed) big speech about the Earth being on the brink of collapse, alongside Tom Hardy frantically climbing into a restaurant’s fish tank to devour live lobsters, Tom Hardy threatening to eat a mugger’s limbs and leave him to roll down the street “like a turd in the wind”, Tom Hardy — well, you get the picture. The limiting nature of Sony’s attempts to build a Spider-Man universe without a Spider-Man often results in sloppily put together projects such as Morbius (2022) and Madame Web (2024), more memorable as memes than movies. What goes some way towards offsetting this restriction in the Venom films, however, is the force of Hardy’s uninhibited, unrestrained performance in his dual roles as reporter Eddie Brock and the alien symbiote Venom.

As Venom, his voicework swings seamlessly between the alien’s all-knowing authoritativeness, his petulance at not always getting his way and his childlike wonder at being introduced to Earth’s many unexpected delights. Eddie, on the other hand, is a showcase for the actor's nimbleness at physical comedy. He radiates exasperation as his limbs flail around jerkily, as though puppeteered by an unruly master. As Venom and Eddie share a body, the friction between them allows Hardy to wring laughs, tears and a surprising amount of sentiment from a performance that essentially involves talking to himself, and Venom: The Last Dance derives its tender tone from the notion that this partnership might finally have to come to an end.

A sense of the party winding down is apparent right from the film's beginning, in which Eddie resurfaces from his exile to an alternate universe, hungover. Elsewhere, news reports of Area 51 — a classified US government testing facility and longstanding popular culture in-joke as an alien housing site — being decommissioned are broadcast on the radio. “Everything will end,” growls another symbiote at one point, warning of Knull (Andy Serkis), the film’s big bad. Imprisoned by the symbiotes on a gloopy CGI planet, Knull sends his Xenophages — symbiote hunters — to acquire the “codex”, a key that exists within Eddie and Venom’s combined form, setting up the potent premise that one or both of them must die by the end.

The two have “been together”, as Venom puts it, for a year by the time The Last Dance begins. If the first Venom film ended with them settling into a bickering, but mutually beneficial alliance and the second one made the homoerotic subtext of their relationship explicit — their “breakup” lead Venom to a rave in which he declared himself “out of the Eddie closet” — this trilogy capper mines heft and heart from their journey with repeated reminders that they’re coming to the end of the road. Being cornered and on the run from the police, the military and a Xenophage isn’t an obvious setup for shenanigans but the film’s brighter moments involve it swerving hard into silliness with scenes of Venom chasing the dopamine rush of gambling in Vegas, doing a choreographed dance to ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’ with store owner Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) or singing along to David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ as Eddie withers in embarrassment. The goofiness is infectious — you can’t help but grin when a fight involving Venom breaking up a Mexican dog-fighting ring features him shoving a bad guy into one of the dog’s cages with a smug, “Who’s a good boy?”.

Adding to the film’s playfulness is the amiable hippie Martin (Rhys Ifans), on a road trip of his own with his family, hoping to spot some extraterrestrials before Area 51 shuts down. The film is peppered with characters who, like him, have deep love or understanding of aliens, from Mrs. Chen to scientist Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple) and her assistant Sadie Christmas (Clark Backo), as if to remind the audience of their own affection for the symbiote and underscore the void that will be left in the absence of any future Venom movies to look forward to.

So compelling is the unhinged intensity of Hardy’s performance, however, that the film’s momentum immediately deflates whenever it cuts away. Several of the other characters talk in pure exposition, awkwardly delivering information their families or colleagues should already know, solely for the audience's benefit. Serkis, who has embodied some of cinema's most instantly recognisable characters — Gollum in Lord of the Rings, Caesar in Planet of the Apes — while cloaked behind the anonymity of motion-capture, is terribly underutilised as Knull, revealed only in brief cutaways, snarling out vacant threats. And this film climaxes, as the rest of the instalments in this franchise do, with an extended symbiote fight sequence, indecipherable multicoloured globs slithering around, not the most cinematic of scenes. The film’s world-ending threats, stakes recycled in dozens of superhero films by now, feel rote and hollow. What works in The Last Dance’s favour is its incredibly earnest exploration of the characters’ personal stakes, particularly what Venom and Eddie have come to mean to each other.

Most ‘to be continued’ title cards in superhero movies these days assume the significance of a threat rather than a promise, an ominous warning that the franchise assembly line will continue to churn, quantity without regard for quality. When these films run out of ideas to carry the franchise forward, they settle for grave robbing the past, sometimes literally — Deadpool & Wolverine, released earlier this year, begins with a character’s grave being dug up. In giving its characters a definitive send-off, one dripping with sentiment as gooey as the symbiote himself, however, Venom: The Last Dance bucks this trend. Its last few minutes cram in an absurd amount of sincerity for a franchise hinging on premise this nonsensical, but the film’s sweet sappiness creeps up on you slowly before packing an emotional punch. At a time when franchises threaten to dance on forever, Venom derives its most heartfelt emotion from wisely knowing when the music must stop.