The Mirror Universe version of The Red Balloon.
Midlife Crisis Crossover calls Venom: The Last Dance the least worst Venom film in cinema history! Unless we count movies about snakes containing literal venom!
Previously on Venom: in Sony’s quixotic quest to throw Spider-Man’s entire Rogues’ Gallery at a wall and see which villain sticks hard enough to spawn a franchise, so far their most profitable contraptions have been the ones starring Academy Award Nominee Tom Hardy in raspy crowd-pleaser mode and a living, hungering, dagger-toothed Sherman tank’s oil spot with Tom Hardy’s voice filtered through a tar pit. The first one, helmed by Zombieland‘s Ruben Fleischer, was a heaping plate of brackish CGI goulash from which Spider-Man’s evil twin somehow emerged in a universe with no Spidey in it. In the sequel, Let There Be Carnage, director Andy Serkis pitted the slapstick duo of Hardy and Hardy against Joel Schumacher’s Natural Born Killers, equal parts vicious and campy with clashing results.
Now the Sony/Columbia marketing department totally swears the trilogy ends here with Venom: The Last Dance. Kelly Marcel, who co-wrote the first one and chiefly wrote Carnage with input from Hardy, steps up here as first-time director as well, following the same career path David Goyer took with the Blade trilogy, from collaborator to overseer. To her credit, The Last Dance couldn’t possibly be as awful as Blade: Trinity was. Granted, V:TLD might be one of those comic-book movies directed more by VFX supervisors than by its actual credited director, but at least they’re directing what she wrote, so control is still hers on some level throughout. Maybe that helped make a difference?
As a reminder of Sony’s fondest wishes for even bigger box office, the final chapter begins in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When last we left Our Antihero(es), Eddie Brock and his cheerily churning chum had fallen through a Doctor Strange portal into a Mexican cabana in the MCU at the end of Carnage‘s end credits, which crossed over into the Spider-Man: No Way Home end credits. For the sake of future buyers of the Venom trilogy 4K boxed set, TLD reprises that latter end-credits scene in its entirety so you don’t have to follow the Spidey films to see Brock and his irascible ink spot sucked into another Strange portal that returns him to his own Spidey-free Earth. Same as the last two, if you love Venom and hate Spidey, this film’s all for you, you weirdo.
Unfortunately for Eddie and Edgy, his life’s still utterly wrecked. This disgraced journalist’s briefly considered Plan A is to take back control by maybe blackmailing a judge with sensitive info, though it sounds weird for a wannabe blackmailer to describe their plan as “blackmail”. Usually the perpetrator rationalizes their crime through other verbs, but nope, Eddie goes straight to “Yeah, I’ll blackmail him!” without even elbowing Venom in its grotesque teeth and saying, “Get it? I’m gonna BLACK-mail the guy! Get it? GET IT?” Alas, the universe has other plans and their long trip out of Mexico wanders through America’s southwest deserts for a while before stalling in Las Vegas — that famous setting of quite a few monster flicks, going back to at least The Amazing Colossal Man and on up to Army of the Dead.
Meanwhile, evil is afoot on a faraway planet! The Venom symbiote is but one of a race of many, led by a shadowy, deposed dictator named Knull — a recent creation who was the Big Bad of a Marvel Comics major crossover event. He’s voiced by Andy Serkis, whom we were just talking about, but no Gollum-level MOCAP performance was required. Knull is imprisoned and immobilized except for his head and neck, even less physically active than Emperor Palpatine. Instead he sends monsters as his proxies — giant muscular flying dinosaur-bugs called Xenophages, which can regenerate from all physical wounds and their head is one big Fargo wood chipper. Insert victim in the mouth, and their guts spray out the back of the head, but recolorized by their saliva for a PG-13 rating.
The Xenophages’ task is basic and ludicrously complicated: kill Eddie and/or Venom, who’ve been retcon-fitted with a nonsensical MacGuffin called simply the “Codex”, a nebulous, unseen, imaginary thingamabob that manifests within whenever a symbiote resurrects its host from the dead. A quick flashback confirms this happened previously, though good luck understanding the Thingamabob’s fake-science specs that go 100% unaddressed and never mentioned again. Killing either the symbiote or the host will release the Thingamabob from wherever/however it exists within them (technorganic implant? piece of a soul? magic tumor? live space gerbil? NO IDEA!), which can be used to unleash Knull and then something awful could happen to the universe, such as a Marvel Comics major crossover event.
Meanwhile, there are also normal humans! For heavy exposition Marcel takes us to the base formerly known as Area 51, which is now being dismantled because Earth-Sony hasn’t been marauded by myriad alien races from beyond as the MCU has…or at least that’s the pretense that hides Area 55, deep underground beneath Area 51 where Area 51 fanboys can’t trespass on it or take blurry selfies with it. Led by Chiwetel Ejiofor (on loan from the indefinitely hiatus’d Doctor Strange series) as ranking officer Rex Strickland and Juno Temple (Ted Lasso, Fargo) as chief scientist Dr. Payne (yep, a comics name!), the government op called Imperium only appears to have two active projects: studying the various symbiote specimens that survived the last movie; and supplying this movie with semi trailers full of recap, pseudo-professional infodumps, and the nominal military/science conflict eternal. Each side will drone on all day about their respective fascinations if you let them.
I mean, they’re basically Chuck Campbell and Bob from Soap.
As Act One slows down for so much Venomsplaining, that exact aspect gave me a key epiphany: “Ohhh, I get it! This is a ’50s B-movie!” Like, intentionally a B-movie, not reduced to that because of studio or talent limitations! The Last Dance is chockablock with everything your classic postwar monster or alien spectacles had. Military men who underestimate their quarry! Scientists who overestimate their controls! Outlandish special-effects bugaboos prone to slaughtering all the humans except the actors at the top of the call sheet! Long slogs through deserts! Mutated animals! A totally made-up fake-science weapon that’ll be a key tool in saving the day! (Lest any viewer be confused by the sight of Chekhov’s Hyperacid Tank.) A gratuitous, plot-stopping musical or dance number! (This one’s got both! One is more grandiose than the other.)
And a central male who, if not a boulder-jawed hero who was perfectly parented into a paragon of purity, is a tortured soul wracked with angst over their luckless lot in life, like David Banner or Glenn Manning. Welcome to their archetype Eddie Brock. He missed his old life, his career, and his Academy-Award-winning girlfriend who’s long gone. He loathed being stuck with the symbiote and constantly having to let it feast upon the heads of stray criminals. Now overcome with Stockholm Syndrome, Eddie’s gotten used to aiding and abetting vigilante homicide, appreciates how the blob has saved his life a couple times in situations that were its fault in the first place, and isn’t thrilled at the idea that one of them might be about to die. Were Eddie an ordinary character, or if this were more like later B-movies such as The Thing with Two Heads, he’d be begging the Xenophage to kill either of them and end his conjoined misery. But in classic B-movie fashion, suddenly he’s aghast and will defend their symbiosis to the bitter end, much like a voter rationalizing their deeply abiding love of their favorite objectively terrible politician, never minding that they were just spewing mean tweets about them eight years ago.
Interpreted through that lens of lowered standards, Venom: The Last Dance is an unapologetically goofy escapade that zings and zips from one set piece to the next. The alien monsters fight and fight and fight in midair, underwater, atop a beautifully night-lit casino, and in the sandy remnants of Area 51, which at night look like just another near-featureless Zack Snyder final-battle plateau. Thrill to the sight of CGI Silly Putty Transformers punching and stabbing and slinging and lancing and eating each other, with graphics noticeably improved over the first film’s blah mishmash. If you love Marvel’s symbiote overpopulation and the ending of the first Shazam!, you might just love the climactic team-up at the end, which has a lot of newly armed combatants. The supporting cast’s body count gets pretty hard to confirm, and I was relieved the film didn’t just keep locking up, like Skyrim on PS3 during a too-busy battle.
What also helps matters a bit, besides the so-bad-it’s-hopefully-good? reframing is the upgraded symbiote performance. Hardy’s growly id can still be grating, but this time around its emotions sound closer to sympathetic, its lines are funnier, its timing is improved, and somehow it learns there’s more to existence than feeding. And there’s something about the way Dark Hardy says “EDD-eeee” with different inflections, many of them not tinged with bloodlist for a change. The duo are still antihero through and through, but they’ve grown, ever so infinitesimally, into a more understandable stand-in for any boy who’d totally love being grafted to a parasitic, insatiable CGI balloon. It’s harder to be annoyed by him than it used to be, and easier to forgive the occasional nitpicks, such as the part where a symbiote — whose fatal weakness is extremely loud sounds — inexplicably rides an airplane without being pulped by 150 dBs of protoplasm-squishing agony.
The MST3K adage perhaps applies: It’s Only a Superhero Movie, You Should Just Relax. Well, if you choose to indulge, anyway. Venom: The Last Dance is the sort of last-hurrah why-not? popcorn flick that keeps salting and buttering itself as it goes, and will air someday on MeTV hosted by Grandson of Svengoolie. Maybe by then we’ll know how Marcel and Sony resisted the urge to call this V3NOM.
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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:
Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Venom is his own comic relief, but a ’50s B-movie can never have too much comic relief! Enter Rhys Ifans (on loan from the Spider-Men’s movies) and Alanna Ubach (Legally Blonde, Pixar’s Coco) as hippie parents leading on-the-nose David Bowie singalongs and dragging their kids on a road trip to Area 51, where they hope to see real aliens but end up as bystanders for Venom to practice the lost art of rescuing innocents from danger. Their kids include Hala Finley from the Matt LeBlanc sitcom Man with a Plan.
Imperium personnel include Jared Abrahamson (Victor’s pal Squid from The Penguin) as the other soldier with lines, and Clark Backo (Apple’s Changeling) as a scientist who really likes Christmas. Ivo Nando (Sons of Anarchy) is the first evildoer who makes the mistake of crossing Our Antihero’s path early on.
Familiar faces include Stephen Graham, the police detective with the most lines from Let There Be Carnage; and Peggy Lu, a.k.a. bodega owner Mrs. Chen, who’s having the time of her life on vacation and is the only human genuinely happy to see Eddie again. Truly obsessive Venom super-duper-fans might hear the voice-only cameo by Reid Scott, who was in the other two films but doesn’t seem to be reprising Dr. Dan…OR IS HE?
And then there’s one more guy…
How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there are indeed scenes during and after the Venom: The Last Dance end credits, after we learn UK natives Ejiofor and Ifans shared a dialect coach. For those who tuned out prematurely and really want to know, and didn’t already click elsewhere…
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[…insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship…]
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…during the end credits: Knull is still imprisoned far away from here, weakened by the defeats of his monster-proxies, but Venom did die, so he’s about to be freed just as soon as some minion shows up and figures out how one transports a “Codex”, and vengeance and domination shall be HIS. AND HE’S LOOKING RIGHT AT YOU AND TALKING TO YOU. YES, YOU, THE VIEWERS AT HOME. KNULL WANTS YOU DEAD. And apparently Sony/Columbia are totally making plans for more movies in this alternate dimension, so he might just get that chance. Sucks to be You, Viewer at Home!
At the very, very end of the end credits: Imperium’s last forgotten captive — Eddie’s Mexican bartender, once again played by Ted Lasso‘s Cristo Fernández — reaches the surface only to find Area 51 an even more tattered wasteland than it was before. All that’s left around him are miles and miles of wreckage, smoldering sands, a single living cockroach, and a broken test tube that may or may not still contain traces of symbiote cells.
And thus does The Last Dance fade out in the most ’50s way possible: with an implied “THE END…?”