‘Venom’ Dances Into the Sunset

Aside from introducing a new blowhard intergalactic MCU menace, the breezy bromance valedictory Venom: The Last Dance knows when to wrap things up. There’s a knee-jerk insistence in corporate-mandated raise-the-stakes scripts to have bloviating subplots and portentous add-on twists. But thankfully the Venom franchise’s co-writer/co-producer Kelly Marcel—making her directing debut—prunes and sometimes even hacks off some of that narrative overgrowth to minimize bloat and maximize fun. She keeps the antics light and tight, with the doomscrolling mostly out of sight.  

This tonally janky franchise, spun off from the Spider-Man Universe, was always proudly marginal anyway—a renegade antihero whatsit starring Tom Hardy as average-Joe Eddie Brock in a symbiotic relationship with a bizarre man-eating alien protoplasm. Who cares about the details of the latest popcorn-picture threat—is this dude fighting bad guys or fighting himself? Exactly!

VENOM: THE LAST DANCE  ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Kelly Marcel
Written by: Tom Hardy, Kelly Marcel
Starring: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Stephen Graham, Peggy Lu, Clark Backo, Alanna Ubach
Running time: 109 mins

Over three proudly unserious movies, eccentric character actor Hardy has clearly reveled in this bizarre buddy comedy riff on Marvel’s fatuous superhero save-the-universe schtick. There was never much substance beyond the cheap thrill of watching a toothy space parasite pop out like a cannibalistic Id and wreak havoc for his punching bag host. At its best, the daffy, vulgar Venom series took the piss out of caped crusaders and masked avengers. And it avoided villains who announced doomsday aspirations in sonorous voices. Until now.

Meet Knull (Andy Serkis, because of course). We never see the enchained heavy’s face, just his long white greasy hair and dark figure, but he pops up in a cold open and again in the post-credit scene for some sourpuss monologuing somewhere at the ends of the universe. Johnny Cash might have been the Man in Black, but this dude is the self-proclaimed King in Black.

According to eyeroll exposition peppering the movie, the world-killing Knull has existed for 280 million years and fathered all the symbiotes, who showed their gratitude to the deadbeat dad by locking him away in a cosmic prison. The only key to his escape: a Codex, not an ancient papyrus manuscript but a sort of glowing orb thingy created when a symbiote finds its perfect mate—in this case, Venom and Eddie, aka the Brock Symbiote. It’s invisible to all but his devil-dog Xenophage minions, who he sends throughout the universe to hunt it down.

The Xenophage are annoying insectoid troopers who don’t menace Brock until he and Venom transmogrify—at which point they jump out of seemingly nowhere and attack ruthlessly. One very disgusting but admittedly kind of cool character trait: when they eat their prey, the remains spray out the back of their heads like a wood chipper.  

Once Knull gets the Codex, he will nullify all life everywhere. “I will kill everyone and you will watch!” he says to no one in particular. Great. We just want to see Venom and Eddie get into bitchy arguments, but you do you. 

New to the franchise, and possibly returning in their own spin-offs: Agony, a purple femme symbiote that emerges when Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple) bonds with one of the outer-space creatures; and Lasher, a lady symbiote with four tendrils who is green because her host, Sadie Christmas (Clark Backo), loves to wear a Christmas Tree brooch. Huh? 

Teddy and Sadie bond with the E.T. beings because they’re scientists who work in Area 55, the new-improved secret alien-study location in Roswell that’s taking the place of the imminently decommissioned Area 51. The U.S. government has been collecting a bunch of hostless symbiotes and putting the blobs in big glass vials. Which means, at some point, someone will definitely yell “release the symbiotes!” 

Added to the mix are Peggy Lu, reprising her comic-relief role as San Francisco bodega owner Mrs. Chen; and Rhys Ifans as a hippie amateur ufologist who says things like “aliens suck!” Venom definitely bites off a few heads, but also turns into a Venom horse, a venom fish, and a Venom frog. It’s cute. There’s also a big spherical tank clearly marked “Hyperacid Dissolvent” that no one talks about but obviously will play a key role at the end. No clarity as to whether or not Wile E. Coyote bought them this from his Acme product catalogue.

 Dark forces loom, Venom dances with Mrs. Chen to Abba, and Eddie stares at the Statue of Liberty while we watch a highlight-reel montage of happy Brock Symbiote moments set to Maroon 5’s “Memories.” “Let’s finish this!” Eddie yells to Venom during the climax. Amen.