Before we bore you with how mind-numbing “Venom: The Last Dance” is, let’s recall how we got here, circling this pitiful drain. Following false starts with two underperforming ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ films, Sony Pictures turned to Marvel for a hand and a mutually beneficial play: Marvel producing “Spider-Man” movies and taking a financial cut in exchange for allowing the webslinger play in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It worked, and with superhero films at their apex, Sony believed they could turn their limited Spider-Man villain characters into its own universe, going as far as believing they would no longer need Marvel after the financial success of “Venom” (2018) and pulling Spidey’s Tom Holland from the MCU for a brief minute. “Venom” may have made bank thanks to China, but the film and its ‘Carnage’ sequel were dire. And history has quickly shown that Sony’s live-action Spiderverse outside Marvel has been a spectacular disaster (the animated ‘Spider-Verse’ is incredible, but that’s something else). Following the laughable failure of “Madame Web,” Sony faceplants again with “Venom: The Last Dance,” a disposable lark arguably more dull than horrible but so excruciatingly tedious it circles back to atrocious.
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‘The Last Dance’ begins with a banal expository prologue—the movie, seemingly believing it’s for idiots, over-explains everything, either through wooden, eye-rolling dialogue or other spoon-feeding mumbo jumbo delivery. The lore begins: evil King symbiote Knull (voiced by Andy Serkis) was imprisoned by other symbiotes ages ago and wants his revenge via attack-dog-esque alien creatures that are searching for “the codec” (groan). The codec is essentially an Apple air tag and the key to freeing Knull, and it’s created if a host dies and then is resurrected by a symbiote—precisely what happened between Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom (also voiced by Hardy) in the inaugural “Venom” movie.
So alien monster insects seemingly borrowed from ‘Attack Of The Clones’ designs are teleported to Earth to track down the codec inside Eddie/Venom. If you’re wondering about the “Spider-Man: No Way Home” post-credit and how they connect, you needn’t worry—it goes nowhere. It’s too pointless to explain other than to say Eddie is back in Sony’s universe when the movie begins (and he’s conveniently wearing a baseball hat that says Mexico to explain to the viewer Eddie is in Mexico just in case you didn’t catch that, clever).
Back on Earth, Eddie gets into some unfunny slapstick-y, violent hijinks with booze (zzzzz) and eventually is sent on a contrived collision course with another of the film’s threads—an experimental lab under Area 51 that thrives undetected as the infamous UFO-rumored-harboring expanse begins to shutter. There, deep underground, the scientist with a traumatic childhood backstory, the inquisitive Dr. Payne (Juno Temple), experiments with symbiotes and even saves the life of Detective Patrick Mulligan(Stephen Graham), mortally wounded in the last film by marrying him to another symbiote. Meanwhile, Army Major Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the military jurisdiction for this underground laboratory, looks on with skepticism and disdain, completely opposite of Dr. Payne’s scientific fascination with the symbiotes and what humans can learn from there.
Soon enough, while being hunted by Strickland’s soldiers and Knull’s creatures, Eddie/Venom make their way to the Area 51 base, but not before meeting a family of bohemian stoner UFO believers led by the genial patriarch Martin (Rhys Ifans; this section is meant to be comic relief, and later, attempt to inject heart into the film when the family is in peril. Spoiler alert, none of it works).
With all the characters under one roof and Payne and Strickland at odds about a captured Eddie/Venom—the soldier believing symbiotes are a menace, the scientist seeing their value—all hell breaks loose, the alien invasion begins, and cue a non-stop third act action pandemonium of rubbery, tentacle-happy aliens trying to kill Eddie/Venom and a host of symbiotes getting loose, finding human hosts and Avengers Assemble style team-up combat. It’s dreadfully mundane and uninspired, only getting interesting at the very end, when ‘The Last Dance’ essentially gets sentimental about its franchise existence with a self-congratulatory montage of old ‘Venom’ clips soundtracked to a hilariously corny “Memories” by Maroon 5, a dopey sequence so tin-eared and earnest, audiences will riotously bust into unintended laughter.
Yeah, there are post-credits pointing to this or that, but you can barely give a sh*t, and let’s hope audiences deliver mercy by telling Sony these films are crap and very few people actually want them.
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Poorly directed by Kelly Marcel, the ‘Let There Be Carnage’ screenwriter, who co-penned this script with Tom Hardy himself in what was said to be a labor of love, boy, this cartoonish film makes that notion an embarrassment. It’s an even more terrible screenplay in how cloying, contrived, obvious, and mollycoddling it is with exposition dumps and shoddily constructed flashbacks.
Tom Hardy seemed poised to be one of the best actors in the world, earning his first Oscar nomination for a supporting role in 2015’s “The Revenant.” Yet, he’s wasted nearly all of his forties in the “Venom”-erse, only appearing in two other movies in those six years (“Capone” and “The Bikeriders”). It’s a shame he put all his cards into this lame-duck franchise because the career damage seems substantial.
For the actor, maybe the goofy, wild antics of this minstrelsy Jekyll and Hyde routine were enjoyable, but the series has always been far, far away from the supposedly inventive Charlie Chaplin meets superhero hybrid he’s always thought it was.

Three films in, the “Venom” franchise still doesn’t seem clear about its identity and what it wants to be. Tonally odd as usual, ‘The Last Dance’ is slightly less inane than ‘Let There Be Carnage’ overall but still has its moments of punctuated preposterousness—a dance scene in the middle of the movie with SF convenience store owner Mrs. Chen (Peggy Liu), for no discernible reasons. Still, it tries to inject “heart,” instead becoming insufferably self-serious, especially in the last half of the movie when it turns into a familiar, do-or-die save-the-world narrative that gets weepy and somber when characters seem poised to die in brave sacrifice for the good of Earth (spoiler alert: no one of consequence dies, but the movie sure makes a maudlin meal out of being temporarily sappy about impending fatalities that don’t actually come to pass).
Contrarian so-bad-its-good specialists with PhDs in advanced irony once hailed the “Venom” films as entertaining campy classics and tongue-in-cheek antidotes to the more conventional superhero genre, but you will not be surprised when none of those scholars pipe up in support of this grueling cinematic slog that further underscores just how bad the entire affair was all along.
With the catastrophe of “Madame Web,” the dismal showing of this final “Venom’ offering, and the seeming impending disaster of “Kraven” (initially scheduled for the worst release date of the year on Labor Day), one has to wonder how much longer this sorry excuse for a superhero spin-off universe can endure (and part of the reason they keep churning out this clunky garbage is so if they don’t they lose rights to the character and its universe).
Ponder that how you will, and, in the meantime, try to enjoy ‘The Last Dance’ if masochistically throwing away your money at utterly forgettable movie content products is your thing. [D-]
Sony Pictures releases “Venom: The Last Dance” on October 25.