Venom: The Last Dance review: "A puddle of pixels that isn’t much fun to splash around in"

At the start of this trilogy-closer for the Venom saga, our bedraggled hero Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is in a Mexican bar ("Hola, bitches!" booms the alien symbiote’s inside voice) and there’s talk of the purple alien who loves stones and of people losing five years of their lives. 

It appears, for a moment, that Venom: The Last Dance is set to sashay across the floor, under disco balls like planets, from one cinematic universe to another, trading Sony’s Spider-Man Universe for the MCU. After all, Venom: Let There Be Carnage’s mid-credits sting featured Peter Parker’s Spider-Man and Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) in a TV news bulletin.

But no, Eddie and his not-so-easy rider are merely getting a head-snaffling taste of another dimension (teasing future adventures, perhaps?), and are soon firmly back in the SSU. "I’m so done with this multiverse shit," growls Venom, and you might well nod in sympathy.

Exposition overload

Anyway, in this particular universe, the big bad is not Thanos or Kang the Conqueror, or the incoming Doctor Doom, but Knull, god of symbiotes, who’s intent on escaping his eldritch prison on a far-flung planet. His endgame? To kill all symbiotes and, while he’s at it, the human race. Only he needs the Codex if he’s to slip his chains and do his evil bidding, and for that he needs Venom. Why? Don’t worry about it – the filmmakers can’t be arsed to properly explain it and there’s already enough exposition to make you want to bite off your own head.

Enter the Xenophage, an ungodly CGI mash-up of a Xenomorph from the Alien franchise, the skittering arachnid bugs from Starship Troopers, and Cooper, the destructive ET in Super 8. Essentially Knull’s version of a Rottweiler straining on its leash, this outsized, snarling beast can sense Venom whenever he shows himself fully (so why Venom does exactly that simply to strut his stuff to ABBA’s 'Dancing Queen', fun though that might be, is a mystery), zeroing in like a heat-seeking missile.

Meanwhile, at the soon-to-be-decommissioned Area 51, Dr. Payne (Juno Temple) studies symbiote matter; franchise cop Mulligan (Stephen Graham), reportedly dead, is in fact proving a stable host to a green symbiote; and General Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor, bringing a grain of gravitas) decides to kill Eddie, or Venom, or both, as soon as he learns of the Codex and its world-ending possibilities.

It's a lot, but it all boils down to one big chase movie, our body-sharing bros going on the lam ("ROAD TRIP!" bellows Venom) to escape not just the Xenophage but Strickland and all of his heavily armed, tech-aided goons.

A series of largely uninspired, uninvolving set-pieces unfurl in the air (a Xenophage vs. Venom smackdown atop a packed airbus), on the ground (Venom using a "nice horsey" as host to gallop across the desert) and underwater (think a sub-aquatic take on Minority Report’s jet-pack chase, with phonier effects). Eventually the plot strands entwine for an extended beast-on-beast(s) climax that, like the finales of the first two movies, quickly devolves into a puddle of pixels that isn’t much fun to splash around in.

An odd couple

Where Venom: The Last Dance entertains is in the incessant bicker-banter between Eddie and Venom (voiced by Hardy, who, let’s face it, was never going to let anyone else have a crack at doing a gravelly growl on his behalf). The Venom movies occupy a space far more safe and sanitized than the source comics, and the big-screen outings have become increasingly smitten with the odd-couple dynamic as they’ve gone on. 

Here, the back-and-forth is unrelenting, but it frequently raises a smile and occasionally an outright guffaw, while it’s also pleasing to see, and hear, just how affectionate these initially fractious companions have grown over three movies. With Michelle Williams’ sadly underused Anne now out of the picture altogether, it’s all about the bromance, and some viewers might even get a little misty eyed over a BFF montage that appears to be entirely serious in its heartstrings-tugging intentions. Others, of course, would gladly swap out the cheese for just a smattering (splattering?) of the carnage offered on the page.

Also enjoyable is a cameo from franchise-favorite Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) and a handful of scenes centered on Rhys Ifans’ hippie family as they head for Area 51 in their VW Campervan, hopeful of spying an ET before the sky falls in on the famous facility. Watching Eddie cringe as mom Nova Moon, kids Leaf and Echo, and dad, er, Martin sing along to Bowie’s 'Space Oddity' is as batshit crazy as Eddie climbing into a high-end restaurant’s lobster tank in the first movie. And that’s before Venom gleefully joins in the crooning.

Sadly, Venom: The Last Dance is rarely so bonkers. Kelly Marcel, who co-wrote Venom and penned Venom: Let There Be Carnage from a story by Hardy, is here on scripting duties with story contributions from Hardy once more, and also makes her directorial debut. 

Frustratingly, her movie maintains the issues of the first two films – ropey effects, muddy night-time action scenes, a determination to be family friendly at all times – and then undoes any goodwill its more successful components have inspired by including a mid-credits sting that renders the previous 109 minutes obsolete. The 'waste of time' gag writes itself.

"Let’s finish this," hollers Eddie in the final stages, to which Venom adds, "With pleasure!" What a shame that the feeling their battle cry most evokes is not exhilaration but relief.

Venom: The Last Dance is released in theaters worldwide on October 25.

For more, check out our guide to the upcoming superhero movies to add to your calendar, as well as how to watch the Spider-Man movies in order.