Tom Hardy’s supposed final outing as the classic Todd McFarlane anti-hero promises a a climactic final battle between the symbiote and their creator and leaves you with a meandering buddy comedy.
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It’s been a yin/yang of a year for fans of the comic book superhero genre. While Deadpool & Wolverine hit a slam dunk promising a long-awaited fan service team-up between Ryan Reynolds’ titular superhero and Hugh Jackman’s super popular Wolverine; it did so using the multiverse concept that’s starting to run itself into the ground with a lot of fans. Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters has teased this same multiverse team-up idea; first in Morbius and later in Venom: Let There Be Carnage where it seemed Venom might finally meet his comic book rival Spider-Man. While Venom: The Last Dance also dances around this idea several times in its runtime, it never delivers. Not only does it not deliver on that Easter Egg planted in multiple films now but it also doesn’t deliver in giving us a fitting finale for Tom Hardy as Venom. Hardy’s unlikely franchise has thrived largely due to his performance as both the namesake symbiote and his every-man counterpart, Eddie Brock. The relationship between the two has always been written as that of a bickering couple, which often leads to laughs opposite Brock’s desire for to reconnect with his ex, Anne, played by Michelle Williams.
The absence of Williams’ character, especially given the character’s importance to both Eddie and the symbiote in the past two films, is just one of the issues with Venom: The Last Dance, which hits theaters on October 25th. The erstwhile plot finds Eddie in South America in the MCU talking about Thanos with a bartender played by Ted Lasso’s Cristo Fernandez before he’s sucked back to Sony’s Marvel Universe due to a portal being opened by a creature called Knull. Knull, a completely CGI character who looks like he lives in a Soulsborne game, but instead lives in “The Void” and he proclaims himself the god and creator of all symbiotes. Knull sends some vaguely off-brand alien xenomorphs called Xenophages to find Venom, who we find contains “the codex” a key to Knull’s prison and once he has it, he and his zenophages will wipe out the Earth. If this sounds vaguely like the plot of “Man of Steel,” down to aliens looking for one of their kind on Earth to find a codex, that’s because it is. That being said, the recycled plot of another superhero film hasn’t stopped a film from being successful, and Hardy certainly has the chops to do so if motivated. The caveat here being Hardy and director Kelly Marcel are very interested in making the film a road comedy with Brock being the put-upon tired old man and Venom wanting to engage in random hijinks that seem out of character given the stakes of the film.
At the same time, the film introduces a vaguely ID4 influenced subplot with Chiwetel Ejiofor playing a military man named Strickland in charge of Area 55, a new secret outpost built on the ruins of Area 51, where a scientist named Dr. Payne (played by Ted Lasso’s Juno Temple) studies symbiotes. Despite their nature in the last Venom movie, these symbiotes are refugees running from Knull and Payne is sympathetic to them due to her own tragic backstory which drew her to science. There’s a lot of Chekov’s guns in this film and rest assured they all get fired. The issue is that despite an interstellar threat that is likened to Thanos in many ways’ several times, the film seems remarkably low stakes when most of the film’s big set-pieces involve venomized animals, dance scenes in Vegas that seem more in place in Deadpool movies and a family singalong in a van that goes on for 10 minutes. That being said, this is the most family friendly of the Venom movies with most of the brain eating and monster destroying happening off-screen or shown so fast it doesn’t register. The film is a CGI-fest which also makes it very hard to follow visually. Venom gets a final victory lap scene and a Shazam like team-up of several unnamed symbiotes that I’m sure will excite many comic book fans, but if I as a viewer am left unimpressed by random rainbow Venom-alikes who don’t really contribute much to the plot, is it really a successful cameo? Especially when the only cameo we want is from a red and blue character who is never mentioned in the film despite being shown in a post credit sequence in the last film?
I want to cheer for films like Venom, who try to do something unique with some of Spider-Man’s one-dimensional side characters. To a very large degree, the first two Venom films did that, certainly 1 more than 2. But at some times, it’s a better service to the fans to give them an engaging outing with a favorite character than cameos and a self-serving arc that doesn’t follow the spirit of the films before it. The film’s post credits seem to promise more dances with Venom than the title alludes to and I hope they have more flavor than this meandering waltz did dancing around with some cool ideas it doesn’t deliver on.
** & /*
2.5 out of 5 Stars – Too much toe-stepping and not enough uptempo on this dance.
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OUT OF THEATRE REACTION
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