It was the Thursday before Thanksgiving break and I was sitting in a dark room writing notes on this silly movie I decided to watch. They consisted almost entirely of quips that jumped out to me (there are a lot of quips) and question marks that cover almost half of the first page. I was watching the movie “Venom: The Last Dance” by the way.
This movie is a lot of things. Not good things, but things. And while it would be really easy to fall back on the classic “Marvel slop” arguments, that’s not the kind of incisive writer I am. Sure, everything since “Avengers: Endgame” has proven to be slop, and Marvel hasn’t shown that it’s capable of producing anything like what it had with the original Avengers, but to say that anything made post-”Avengers: Endgame” is simply terrible is a lazy and unexamined argument.
With that being said, this movie sucked. I know I might get some criticism for overanalyzing a movie made for entirely commercial purposes, but it is hard not to make a comparison to the earlier Marvel movies (and even just the earlier two Venom movies) and see a distinct falloff of anything good in the modern superhero movie. Oh, and on the subject of just enjoying things? Well, I didn’t. This movie was genuinely hard to watch. Let’s get into it.
Two of my biggest problems with this movie have to do with the lack of a real staple villain, as well as the often confusing and jumbled plot. On the first point, there is technically a villain in the movie, named “Knull,” but he never actually makes an appearance on Earth, instead sending his little cockroach-esque monsters through portals to attack the titular Venom. The opening scene introducing him gives little to no information about him (although apparently the character has great significance as a villain in the Marvel Comics), and it felt, like many other moments in “Venom: The Last Dance:” visually cluttered and all over the place.
By the way, the guy playing the villain? Andy Serkis. “Hey!” I thought. “Hasn’t Andy Serkis already been a villain in Marvel movies before?” The answer to that: obviously, yes.
Oh boy, I sure hope this isn’t indicative of a wider trend in Marvel movies of them returning well-known faces to the screen in order to pull people to the box office. No, I’m sure this is only a one-time thing. Wait. You’re telling me they’re doing this exact same thing with — Robert Downey Junior? The guy who had the most heartbreaking and consequential death in a billion dollar franchise spanning twenty-three movies, completely invalidating everything you hold dear and proving that Marvel doesn’t care about anything other than profits? Wow. This is an article about “Venom: The Last Dance,” by the way.
On the matter of plot… oh boy. In attempting to juggle several different plot lines — a doctor with a bad past, a dysfunctional family on a road trip, Mrs. Chen’s return for some reason and the villain trying to kill Venom — this movie somehow fails to deliver on any of them. The whole doctor storyline is not explained well, the family that Eddie finds himself hitchhiking with feels like an afterthought and is borderline cringeworthy at times, Mrs. Chen’s return feels like a piece of candy the screenwriter threw in like, “Hey! You remember Mrs. Chen, right?” and the villain was never even dealt with, leaving the end of the movie basically pointless.
This, when compounded with the classic Marvel hallmark of crappy one liners made by all-too-jolly superheroes, really drags on the viewer. And while I understand that the jokes are allowed to flow more freely because Eddie has made peace with the Venom symbiote, I somehow think Venom shouting “hola b*tches!” to a bunch of Mexicans was less than stellar. After that, Eddie and Venom have an Instagram Reels-worthy scene in which they struggle to say “we are Venom” at the same time, resulting in Eddie dropping the awe-inducing line of “we are totally gonna need to work on that” before literally eating several guys’ heads off. Really great stuff.
This leads into another one of my big gripes with the movie: tone. It feels like it can’t decide what it wants to be. Does it want to be a continuation of the first movie’s grittiness with quips thrown in, or does it want to expand in a new direction with side characters? Though the latter feels like the answer, the side characters are so undeveloped that it becomes almost entirely Eddie and Venom — a dynamic that was already wearing thin by the second Venom movie.
To his credit, Tom Hardy is an incredibly solid actor, but even his performance cannot save the dazed plot from dragging on from one idea to the next. I say “idea” here because that’s exactly what each individual scene felt like. Venom goes to the casino? Venom dances with Mrs. Chen in a bizarre musical number? The family Eddie hitchhikes with tries to make him sing with them? Why is any of this happening?
To end the movie, which was almost entirely carefree in terms of plot direction up until the final twenty minutes, the gravity of everything suddenly intensifies tenfold, and, spoiler alert, Venom sacrifices himself to kill one of the bug things.
The sacrifice feels utterly pointless in the grand scheme of things. It hurts a little, sure, but it just feels like none of this had to happen. Once again, why is any of this happening?
A movie that was supposed to be a bittersweet sendoff for a beloved anti-hero, “Venom: The Last Dance” instead falls completely flat on its face, due to a confused plot that destroys any real meaning to be found in the ending of Eddie Brock’s storyline. It feels instead that “Venom: The Last Dance” was a stepping stone to later movies that might involve Knull and the aforementioned doctor, completely invalidating Eddie Brock as a character in favor of moving forward. Tom Hardy performs well, yet the movie that was supposed to be Venom’s last dance instead feels far more like an execution of the character, and perhaps the audience too. Overall, I’d rate it a 4 out of 10; it’s unwatchable.