With the 2018 film “Venom,” Tom Hardy locked himself into a three-picture deal, giving his time, talents and torso to this saga about a man named Eddie Brock possessed by a fanged, body-snatching alien parasite named Venom who pops in and out of his skin like a hyper-violent prairie dog. The overly plotted “Venom: The Last Dance,” written and directed by Kelly Marcel, concludes the trilogy by hammering home all that Eddie has sacrificed to merge with this impulsive, smack-talking goo blob. In the first movie, Eddie was an ambitious San Francisco investigative journalist with a fiancée played by Michelle Williams; here, he’s a filthy drifter on a Mexican bender who’s lost his career, his woman and his reputation. Forced to go on the lam to flee a murder accusation, Eddie makes a running joke out of the fact that he can’t even hang on to a pair of shoes.
In glimpses, this is a drama about a drunk who finds himself unbearably lonely despite being conjoined with a garrulous monster. Hardy voices both reedy Eddie and gravelly Venom and his roiling one-man-band of a performance continues to be the only reason to keep up with the films. Highlights here include the herky-jerky chaos Eddie/Venom causes as he mixes a Michelada while grooving to “Tequila,” and the moment when he’s suctioned to the fuselage of an airplane like a Garfield plushie and sighs, “It is so unpleasantly cold.” Eddie and Venom even detour to Las Vegas, the capital city of self-destruction, and dub themselves Thelma and Louise.
But these mild pleasures are overwhelmed by a barrage of underdeveloped supporting characters — Chiwetel Ejiofor as a general, Juno Temple and Clark Backo as Area 51 scientists, a hippy family headed by Rhys Ifans — plus a nifty spidery nasty who gobbles its victims like a scuttling wood chipper and, when sliced up, stitches its long limbs back together. There’s also a barely introduced major villain named Knull (Andy Serkis, the director of 2021’s “Venom: Let There Be Carnage”) who seems to exist only so that the studio can bridge this finale to some other future comic book flick.
Honestly, I’d rather watch Eddie and Venom dicker over pizza toppings than team up for something as banal as saving the planet. Yet, this film prefers the latter and the bombastic battle scenes that come with it. Marcel, making her directorial debut, claws toward a strong emotional climax that’s undercut by a post-credits sequence which implies that everything our heroes just endured didn’t matter at all. The mechanics of the Marvel Machine must keep on cranking.
The film fills time with sequences set to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Abba’s “Dancing Queen,” plus a winkingly sentimental montage of Eddie and Venom that unspools over a Maroon 5 ballad. These spliced-together bits from all three films salute the dopey screwball comedy the franchise hit in its best moments — and, even more so, feel like a toast to the end of Hardy’s contractual agreement.
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