Tom Hardy’s Antihero is Unmoored from Everything We’ve Seen Before
DIRECTOR: KELLY MARCEL/2024
To review Venom: The Last Dance, perhaps the best place to begin is with the post-screening chatter: “Maybe Madame Web wasn’t that bad after all!”
“That bad” is relative, of course. A movie about a guy who was in the Amazon with Madame Web’s mom when she was researching spiders just before she died may not be good, but it is watchable, which isn’t a half-hearted compliment I can muster up for the third Venom.
When we left Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom (also Hardy) at the end of 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, they had just fled San Francisco after escaping police custody. In Last Dance, we rejoin them in Mexico where Eddie learns he’s been framed for killing frenemy Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham). That’s not his biggest problem, though: A demon-eyed alien whose wannabe-Legolas locks are in need of a desperate shampoo has sent giant wannabe-spiders to hunt them down. From there, the potpurri plot would best be described by Saturday Night Live’s Stefon because it has everything: Las Vegas! Rain Man references! Acceptance of the multiverse! Rejection of the multiverse! Chiwetel Ejiofor in the military! Juno Temple in Area 51! Rhys Ifans in a hippie van! The back of Reid Scott’s head in a dark room! Also, don’t forget the Codex, which is that thing where a human and and symbiote merge after one of them dies thus creating a homing beacon for homicidal aliens who can only see it when the human and symbiote are fully merged so the symbiote is forced to merge with a horse instead.
Yeesh, that’s enough of that Weekend Update, though perhaps now you can understand why Stefon might pick The Last Dance as New York’s new hottest club. Did the studio hack this to bits in the name of setting up a cinematic universe? Or, as my colleague Max Foizey speculated, perhaps last fall’s actor and writer strikes slashed the production timeline into something untenable? Though Venom has never been my cup of tea, the first two stood out in the superhero onslaught by narrowing their universe to San Francisco, facing off with charismatic (and human) villains, keeping runtimes under two hours, and pushing PG-13 ratings with uncouth humor. The third chapter in this Jekyll/Hyde saga, however, falls prey to many superhero blunders: non sequitur plot points, too many bad guys, half-developed arcs, and watered-down comedy. All of a sudden, it’s interested in mythology and MacGuffins instead of Michelle Williams, whose absence is more glaring than you’d expect. Without Eddie trying to win her back from perfect-on-paper fiancé Reid Scott, The Last Dance feels more like an early Thor movie than a Venom one. (More confusing: Scott is in the film…plotting with the military? In the previous films, he played comic relief as a nice guy doctor.)
The new emotional crux is Eddie’s twisted relationship with Venom, but it’s still difficult to believe this will be satisfying for franchise fans. (Mild spoiler alert!) Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) is delightful, but why is she in Las Vegas? Why is Eddie concerned with becoming a father for the first time? Who framed Eddie for murdering Mulligan? Why is it now easy to bond with a symbiote when it took Riz Ahmed a whole movie to figure it out? And dear me, what on earth is the back of Reid Scott’s head doing in that dark room? None of these questions get satisfying answers. (Mild spoilers over.) Even in a subgenre reliant on nonsensical, expository mumbo jumbo, this is some of the laziest, recton-happy plotting I’ve seen in a comic book adaptation. Like I said, maybe Madame Web wasn’t so bad after all.