Tom Hardy returns as Eddie Brock/Venom in Kelly Marcel’s Venom: The Last Dance, and here’s our review of the film.
Well, where were we? 2018’s Venom was arguably the film that turned Tom Hardy from an acclaimed actor into a full-on movie star. 2021’s sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage turned into a monstrous box office hit just when cinemas needed one, and left narrative threads for an already-promised third chapter. That third chapter is Venom: The Last Dance, already teased a trilogy-closer, and as such, inevitably there’s an expectation that homework would be required to keep on top of what’s happened this far.
Homework, after all, has become a near-necessity for a comic book movie with a Marvel logo anywhere near it. When Venom: The Last Dance opens by throwing lots of effects, an imprisoned creature, crunchy audio and such like, I figured it was the same drill.
“I will reward you with your lives”, snarls a figure on screen, while also paradoxically declaring their intention to destroy every single planet. I scribbled in my notebook: what’s the point in having your life spared, if there’s nowhere left to live?
And yet, cut forward to an hour, and I found myself in the middle of something I really didn’t expect: a road movie.
It turns out that writer/director Kelly Marcel (and she fashioned the story alongside star Tom Hardy) is as determined to show what else a third film in a superhero franchise can be as I was interested in watching in. Symbiotic, you might say. “I’m done with this multiverse shit”, she gets Tom Hardy to spit out in the first five minutes, and I immediately sat up in my chair. Deadpool And Wolverine would have got ten minutes out of that, this film makes its point and moves on. Economy has been a welcome feature of this particular trilogy.
Once past the prologue of impending threat, we’re left with Tom Hardy, drunk and in a bar. Sure, he watches one of those info-drop news reports that nobody watches in such an establishment, but Marcel seems to have made a decision to throw in occasional moments where characters talk in plot development, in a determined and much-appreciated effort to get the running time down. She walks a line between filling in bits we need to know from before – hello Stephen Graham! – and getting to the guts of this particular film really rather well.
Beyond the big bad universe-ending stuff, there are then two narrative strands that occasionally interweave. The least interesting, but perfectly serviceable, sees Chiwetel Ejiofor’s General Strickland on a mission to track down Hardy’s Eddie Brock/Venom, with at one stage a really well done underwater chase sequence, that’s occasionally blurred by CG things fighting each other. Juno Temple also sits in this bit of the film as Dr Teddy Payne, bringing welcome unease to a relatively predictable role.
By far the best chunk of Venom: The Last Dance though is when Eddie Brock/Venom take to the road. This bit, save for the computer graphics, could have been a low budget adventure in its own right, and there’s a little bit of indie spirit to it.
What struck me as the movie went on is the duality of the character comes with duality of stakes. Eddie is wanted by the feds, and determined not to be caught. Venom doesn’t want the entire universe to die.
The road movie veers off into really quite unexpected places, offering the best moments of the entire trilogy for me. Rhys Ifans pops up as alien-obsessive Martin, for instance, and leads an unexpected, delightful singalong that also features two children and a dog. There’s a moment I struggle to describe involving a horse. We take a trip to Vegas, where someone pisses on Tom Hardy’s shoes. There’s a dance sequence that comes out of nowhere, which I’ve no intention of spoiling, and we’re treated to snippy one-liners that Tom Hardy delivers to, well, Tom Hardy.
Tom Hardy is very good at this stuff, and continues to be.
It’s almost a shame that it then comes together for the more traditional trilogy-closing blockbuster stuff. The last 15 minutes or so proves to be one of those ‘let’s throw everything at it’ finales, and drives slap bang through the gates of convention, where previously the film has demonstrated an underlying determination to steer away. Sure, it’s big and loud and mad, but it’s also computer graphics fighting computer graphics. Marcel moves it along, but I couldn’t help but want the road movie back.
That I got it in the first place though is no small feat in the middle of a huge expensive blockbuster film. It feels borderline incredible too that – even with a narrative arc of three films to tie up – the credits start rolling when we’re not even at the 100-minute mark. And not because it’s been hacked to death by suits in the editing room. This ends a trilogy! It’s got comic book stuff to explain! But no: it doesn’t come close to troubling two hours.
Sit through the approximately 16 minutes of credits, and you’ll get both an appreciation of how many people it takes to make a film like this, and a bit of extra footage too. But I walked away from the movie more interested in the surprising boldness of its middle section, and gratified that someone took a swing.
I’d been reasonably entertained by the two films to date, even if I’ve not reached for the discs since. Venom: The Last Dance though, while still fighting its own duality of what it’s trying to do, is comfortably my favourite of them.
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