Venom: The Last Dance brings a close to Tom Hardy’s Venom trilogy. Following the events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Eddie Brock and his symbiotic ally Venom are on the run, and that’s when the Symbiote’s past finally catches up to them. The Last Dance promised to feature prominent supervillain of the Marvel comics, Symbiote God Knull. Building on from the second movie featuring Carnage, it seemed like the best place to end the trilogy would be with Knull.
As it turns out, Knull doesn’t have much of a presence in the movie, instead the entire movie just feels like it was setting the character up as the big bad for another movie in this universe, likely The Sinister Six. Rather than facing off against Knull, the climactic film of the trilogy centres around Eddie and Venom running away from some random alien, sent by Knull, as well as the military in a terrible side-plot.
The movie tries to take on a sort of road-trip vibe as the pair travel from Mexico to Nevada, though it isn’t very successful. Their travelling is constantly interrupted by cuts to the Area 51 storyline which features uninteresting characters and very forced foreshadowing towards the third act, while still not really adding much to the story.
It’s clear that by the third film of this franchise, they don’t know what to do with the Eddie and Venom relationship anymore. From the start of the movie to the end neither of them grow or change themselves, and the same goes for their relationship with their counterpart. The comedy between the pair falls flat here also, as at this point it feels like re-treading the same ground.
Additionally, the writing here is simply not great. That shouldn’t be a surprise by now- The Last Dance is the fifth film in the universe and also happens to be the fifth you can say that exact thing about. Characters know things they shouldn’t, act out of character just to force the plot along and you can’t suspend your disbelief enough to believe their actions. Sometimes it’s really bewildering. Such as Eddie acting bothered over the fact that he just killed someone – despite spending the last two movies doing just that. Presumably this is because Venom does most the killing for the duo, but even then this feels quite detached from reality. Really, Sony?
The third act is a mess of action scenes with little in the way of satisfying or engaging moments. The dramatic moment it all leads up to is predictable and falls flat. That coupled with the two most useless post-credits scenes I’ve ever witnessed in my life makes the entire movie underwhelming.
Overall, it’s far from the objectively worst movie I’ve ever seen. It’s just that I struggle to find anything particularly positive to say about it either.
What’s next for Venom?
I have to admit, I have a soft spot for this universe. Let There Be Carnage, Madame Web and Morbius are all really terrible films, yet, I always manage to find enjoyment in those bad aspects of them- something I can’t say the same about The Last Dance, which really was a boring time. As the final film in the Venom franchise it falls flat.
Kraven the Hunter releases soon, and as a Kraven fan I’m prepared to have any joy ripped to shreds by yet another instalment in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, but from there I fear for the future. Morbius was a financial flop and many other announced movies have been cancelled or not mentioned for years. After The Sinsiter Six we may never get a movie as entertainingly bad as these ever again. It’s starting to look like the end is Knull for the universe.
Featured Image Credit: Sony Pictures
Third year Journalism student passionate about video-games.
