Venom: The Last Dance
In Venom: The Last Dance, the vaudeville-style quirky banter between the eponymous symbiote and its human host Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is arguably the best it’s been in this unlikely trilogy..
Their origin story out of the way and a second, less memorable adventure (Let There Be Carnage) behind them, the duo can more fully revel in the unbridled id of, say, Venom mixing a crazy cocktail behind a bar and inhabiting a horse for a quick ride in the desert, complete with a steady diet of silly one-liners that keep the laughs coming.
However, it turns out this zany chemistry is practically the lone consistent element in a film undermined by various scatterbrained subplots cooked up by writer/director Kelly Marcel, making her first trip behind the camera after co-writing and writing, respectively, the first two Venom entries..
The story’s primary offender involves Area 51 symbiote researcher Dr. Teddy Paine (Juno Temple) collecting specimens through her military colleague Strickland (a noticeably uninvested Chiwetel Ejiofor, who’s been in need of a new agent for at least five years). But not far behind is the narrative steand involving a xenophage — a symbiote hunter sent by Knull (Andy Serkis), Venom’s people's incarcerated enemy,
The more that's revealed about the xenophage, the less it makes sense. Though the sight of flesh-and-blood organisms getting spit out its back like a walking, screeching wood chipper suggests Marcel may be a die-hard Troma fan.
Also in the mix is a stereotypical hippie family led by UFO-obsessed dad Martin (Rhys Ifans), which offers fairly steady laughs but feel like the product of 11th hour revisions, there to tie the messy story together.
Fortunately, The Last Dance never lingers on these distractions for too long. After a few mind-numbing minutes, it's back to our heroes acting kooky in Las Vegas or showing that Venom knows how to “fly.”
Practically all of these players collide in a chaotic grand finale that's thankfully easy to follow on a visual level, seeing as it's sorely lacking in logic. It’s a fitting end to a sloppy yet entertaining series that never truly got its due and, considering the industry’s current superhero fatigue, probably never will.
Grade: B-minus. Rated PG-13. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10, Carolina Cinemark, and Regal Biltmore Grande.
(Photo: Sony Pictures)
