Love or hate the last two Venom movies – and we fall closer to the latter – at least both of them had something to offer. The first movie finally gave us a proper realisation of Venom in a feature length movie (the bits from Spider-Man 3 weren’t enough) and Let There Be Carnage was one of the dumbest movies we’ve ever seen, which at least made it funny in an eye roll kind of way. The Last Dance, on the other hand, has almost nothing to with the sentiment of the movie coming across as “here’s more of the slop you guys seemed to enjoy in the past”.
“In Venom: The Last Dance, Tom Hardy returns as Venom, one of Marvel’s greatest and most complex characters, for the final film in the trilogy. Eddie and Venom are on the run. Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie’s last dance,” reads the synopsis of the movie we’ve been provided.
By “both of their worlds” it means the authorities for all the murder that happened in Let There Be Carnage for Eddie and, for Venom, it’s his creator – Knull. As revealed in the trailers for this that we’ve embedded below, Knull is the big bad of this movie and he’s after Venom, Eddie and the rest of the world.
With the symbiote pair on the run the movie kicks off and, bam, we’re hit right in the face by the continued and irritating voice work from Hardy. We’re sorry if you enjoy his terrible, rambling and almost inaudible way of speaking as Marvel’s worst journalist, but man is it grating in each and every scene. We’ve often complained about the fact that Hollywood has seemingly forgotten how to properly level and present dialogue in movies, but the problem here is simply that Hardy’s version of Eddie talks like an idiot who mumbles and whispers all the time.
Also providing the affects-heavy voice for Venom, this has the opposite problem of being loud and distracting. It is at the same time annoying and funny, in a bad way, when this voice then needs to be bent into shape to deliver some “touching” moments in this cap for the trilogy. The Last Dance, like the previous two movies and maybe more so because of repetition, is a terrible event for your ears.
And triple so because of the music, but we’ll get to that later.
As much as we hated listening to Hardy, we will admit that we liked watching him. He puts in a lot of great physical comedy that is full on slapstick throughout this movie. We’re approaching silent movie levels of wacky bodily hijinks here which is were some solid laughs can come from which is very much appreciated as they’re certainly not coming from the writing. As we got to the credits and have now had some time to reflect on the movie, it may be its only redeeming feature. That and the wardrobe for the character, which is peak schlub.
The script of The Last Dance is in shambles. While the overall plot is relatively simple, albeit suffering from one of the worst terminal cases of “complicated McGuffin” that we’ve seen in years, everything that happens to move that plot forwards is unnecessary, weirdly portrayed and mashed together like a toddler who doesn’t know how puzzles work.
The subplots and other cast aside from Hardy are weird and misplaced in a way that’s tough to explain. It feels like many characters in this movie should have been big players set up in the last two movies, the filmmakers realised they didn’t do any of that groundwork, so they tried to shove them in here and give them some gravitas.
Characters, which are new for this movie, are presented like they have some big backstory or overall importance to the three-movie adventure, but they don’t. Only one new character, portrayed by Juno Temple, has any kind of real backstory by way of a short dream sequence of her past, but it simply has no real bearing on the actual plot and we’re just left further puzzled by its inclusion over other story elements in the overall plot.
If you simply don’t give a damn about acting or writing in a movie you knew, expected and wanted to be dumb, you may now just be hoping for good action. Well too bad.
The previous two movies suffered from other Symbiotes being the main antagonists for Venom to fight, resulting in “action” that was the equivalent of watching two differently-coloured liquids collide in a physics simulation. The Last Dance tries to get around this with hunter aliens that aren’t gooey Symbiotes sent out by Knull.
While this has helped a bit, as well as the inclusion of some extra colour in some fights, the action is still rather uninteresting and nothing to get excited about.
The movie sure wants you to get excited, though, which is why it drops so many licenced music tracks into various scenes. These are some of the worst needle drops we’ve ever dealt with in modern movies with the song choices either being so on the nose it hurts or so out of place it hurts even more.
We’re really struggling to think of a single thing we liked about Venom: The Last Dance. We were so uninterested in what the movie had to show that we even noticed some small annoyances like the reuse of a surveillance camera shot where, hilariously, a high class Las Vegas hotel that only lets in well-dressed gamblers has the same rusted and old camera as a dive bar in a gang-infested section of Mexico. This isn’t a nit-pick but rather a example of this movie’s entire philosophy.
We can’t recommend anyone sees this movie, even if you happened to catch the first two and feel some obligation to end the trilogy.
FINAL SCORE: 3 OUT OF 10.
