Regardless of the sliding quality across the films and shows, the Marvel Cinematic Universe from Marvel Studios is still an unparalleled success with the single Disney-led mainline movie in 2024, Deadpool & Wolverine, becoming a $1 billion hit, leading to a success that hopefully translates into some friendly and healthy competition from James Gunn’s DC Studios in the years ahead.
Operating as a universe born from churlish spite is the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Movies, or as I like to call it SPUMM. Five films released over six years have shown that all that Sony has been able to conjure up as the competition to the MCU is a series of occasionally campy but frequently dreadful movies, each more boring than the last. Kicking off the spurious SPUMM was 2018’s Venom, a movie about a comic book character whose whole identity is tied to his hatred of Spider-Man, but in this cinematic universe, Spider-Man is a non-entity. Even when Spidey references are horrifically forced into Morbius and Madame Web, Sony never once pulls the trigger on their profitable IP figurehead, dancing around his existence mockingly. They know you nerds want to see ol’ webhead and the Lethal Protector together, so for years they’ve inflicted tasteless teasing which results in some of the worst superhero movies on the market. And Venom: The Last Dance happily fits right alongside its hideous siblings.
Written and directed by Kelly Marcel, Venom: The Last Dance sees the return of Tom Hardy as the man and symbiote duo, Eddie Brock and Venom, intertwined whether they like it or not. On the run from a crime they didn’t commit, Eddie and Venom evade capture while also being pursued by intergalactic villains intent on destroying the universe using something Venom possesses.
Never before have you seen Tom Hardy so utterly lost in a movie, one that feels like it was shot during COVID and being released four years later. Our antihero travels to Mexico, Las Vegas, and Area 51 and you have never seen such places so deserted and lazily used. Hardy wanders from scene to scene muttering to himself, ragged and horrid looking, dragged from location to location wherever the plot demands him to be. Gone is the unintentional manic hilarity from the first two movies, replaced by sanitised kid-friendly humour and action with plot beats that you can see coming a mile away. Hardy’s radiant unenthusiastic stance for the material reminds one of Jennifer Lawrence in Dark Phoenix; all the energy and passion for the character is burnt out by now, and you can feel it in every line reading.
Dragged to even lower depths of one-dimensional character hell are Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Clark Backo, and Rhys Ifans, each playing the most generic, stereotypical military figures, scientists, and hippies. Ejiofor and Ifans involvement feels especially egregious as it reads like Sony was just baiting fans by suggesting there could be connections to the actors previous comic book roles (Doctor Strange Baron Mordo and The Amazing Spider-Man’s Lizard, respectively), and thus they do nothing but be plot points with faces. Juno Temple is given a rather laughable backstory shown in soap-opera flashbacks that exist entirely to set up some weak third-act power-up, and Clark Backo (known for Letterkenny and The Changeling) is relegated to a quirk of loving Christmas as her sole character trait. Everyone is either saddled with flat attempts at humour or some of the most tin-eared exposition I’ve ever heard in a Hollywood blockbuster.
Kelly Marcel has been the writer of all three Venom movies, as well as producer of the last two, and her directorial debut here reminds me again of Dark Phoenix; another producer-writer trying their hand at a big final movie for a set of characters that ends up being the lowest entry in the series because of how incompetent it all really is. Venom: The Last Dance doesn’t feel like Marcel and Hardy (creative partners and friends) have been finally given the freedom to go crazy with the characters, with the film feeling like any last remaining adherence to the wildness of the character has been stripped away and jumbled up by obvious studio interference, leading Marcel to feel like a director set up to fail.
No better is this interference felt than in the main antagonist of the picture, the creator of the symbiotes Knull. Revealed only in the last two trailers weeks before this movie’s release, Knull is seen in the comics to be one of the most important villains recently in the Marvel Universe, so how does this movie handle him? Well, by strapping him into a chair (flashback to the 2014 memes of Thanos), saddling him with dialogue that is all exposition delivered to no one, and having his scenes (all two of them) look like a World of Warcraft expansion trailer. Knull was clearly a last-minute idea, as any mention of him by other characters on Earth is either done by ADR-voiced CG characters, off-screen dialogue, or by Tom Hardy in obvious pick-up scenes where his hairline changes shot-to-shot. Knull has no impact on the story at large and only exists, once again, to bait the die-hard fans into a cinematic Ponzi scheme.
Morbius and Madame Web were far more incompetent and boring movies, and Venom: The Last Dance has some brief flickers of life, but by the end you feel cheated by years of possibility, with Hardy himself barely making anything else in that time, culminating in an illogical sacrifice, no Spider-Man connection, and “Memories” by Maroon 5. Michelle Williams had the good graces to abandon this franchise, as Venom: The Last Dance is a flat, messy, and ugly waste of time. Just like all of SPUMM.
Director: Kelly Marcel
Cast: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple
Writer: Kelly Marcel, (Story by Tom Hardy & Kelly Marcel)
Producers: Avi Arad, Tom Hardy, Kelly Marcel, Hutch Parker, Amy Pascal, Matt Tolmach
Music: Dan Deacon
Cinematography: Fabian Wagner
Editor: Mark Sanger