BY HARLAN CHAPMAN-GREEN
s it me, or has the “horror season” at the box office not been very interesting this year? I can’t think of a single movie in that genre I particularly wanted to see, what I did want to see was the movie supposedly at the end of the “Sonyverse” Venom series of films featuring Tom Hardy (Black Hawk Down, Inception, Legend) which kicked off in 2018.
I’ll come in straight off here by saying that I’m not too familiar with Venom as he appears in Marvel’s comics; my only real base for this character is from these films, although I have looked into him a little in my own time. That means that I won’t be nerding out over lore details in this review; I’ll instead be going into it as I think most of the audience will: as someone who has some interest in the franchise and has seen the previous films. If you haven’t yet watched Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) I would highly recommend that you do so before you watch this film so you have more context going in.
That said, there isn’t much else to say except that from this point on, there will be plot spoilers for this film and maybe some for the aforementioned films.
I should also mention that I missed a small part of the film’s beginning. I came in, where Eddie and Venom were hungover and wandering the streets. I doubt I missed too much, but if the film was a solid 10/10 for the first 10 minutes or so, do tell me in the comments.
The beginning of this film picks up from the end of the previous one; if you have no idea what happened in that, then don’t worry, nobody’s expected to remember any of this, and it probably won’t matter. Eddie and the Venom symbiote were stuck in the main multiverse (I think?) that all the other characters from other films are in, but then they ended up back in their own universe where there is no Spiderman so far or anything like that. Look, these movie universes are always confusing to me; most people refer to the world Eddie and Venom came from and then returned to as the ‘Sonyverse’ as Sony is mainly in charge. Incidentally, most fans don’t like the ‘Sonyverse’.
So, Eddie and Venom are getting drunk in Mexico, where they’re hiding as they’ve been blamed for the murder of Detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Line of Duty [tv series]) who I’d forgotten was in the last film until I read the IMDB page for it before writing this paragraph. The two realise they must go to New York City to clear their names using a lawyer there, but not before a few more drinks.
We get to a scene where hungover Eddie’s wandering around and he finds a place where some bad guys are keeping dogs for cruel animal fighting. It’s a little tense, but we know that Venom’s going to do something, and predictably, all the bad guys end up with their heads getting bitten off by the symbiote, who needs a chemical that can only be found in brains and chocolate to sustain himself. The previous films have been criticised for not being gruesome enough when it comes to details like this, mostly so they conform to a lower age rating, but this brings a bit more balance as you can clearly see people having their heads removed, although there are no fountains of blood in this scene.
Neither Eddie nor Venom realise that an incredibly powerful alien called a Xenophage is tracking them. For reasons that will become clear later on, and for my amusement, I’ll refer to the Xenophage as the ‘woodchipper alien’ from now on. For those who don’t know, symbiotes in this universe are powerful alien beings that can do all sorts of crazy things, including having superhero-like powers (Venom has powers similar to his nemesis Spiderman). Still, they need a compatible host to survive. When said host dies, if a symbiote is quick enough, it can revive its host, as Venom did in the first movie. A side effect of this is that a ‘Codex’ is made, which is a key to opening a prison that a character called Knull, who’s played by Andy Serkis (The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) is locked in. Venom explains that much himself, but Knull isn’t explained much more than that. Although, it’s mentioned that he created the symbiotes, and if he gets let out of his space prison, it’s bad news.
Now, the woodchipper alien is incredibly sensitive to the Codex, but can only fully see it when Venom takes over and becomes the full supersuit. When the Codex is revealed, however, the woodchipper alien becomes incredibly aggressive and can do crazy things like jump huge distances and run at immense speeds. This is handy as the quickest way Venom tries to take Eddie to New York City is by holding onto the side of an aeroplane – wait – wasn’t Venom affected by the sounds of nearby planes due to the high volume, high pitch sounds their jet engines emit in previous movies? Yes, but this movie wouldn’t happen if it remembered that, so let’s all forget it together. Eddie and Venom narrowly escape by jumping off the plane, with Venom acting as a parachute, but they are then stranded in the desert and forced to walk and talk to one another.
The movie has a couple of subplots, with the main one being that underneath Area 51, there’s a secret facility which is holding and researching other symbiotes. Rex Strickland, played by Chiwel Ejiofor (Serenity, The Martian), is the main ‘army guy’ in the film and is tracking down Eddie and Venom, catching them as they trek through the desert. Venom has no choice but to take over and try to escape, thus revealing their location to the woodchipper alien, which appears almost immediately and earns its name by eating some of the soldiers and spewing out fountains of blood in mere moments as if they were nothing. I’m glad they fixed the lack of blood issue they previously had in these films, and the woodchipper alien is pretty horrifying on screen.
Anyway, Eddie and Venom narrowly escape Strickland’s troops and the woodchipper alien and come across Martin, a hippie (Rhys Ifans – Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, House of the Dragon [tv series]), and his family on their way to Las Vegas (and onwards to Area 51) in an old Volkswagen camper van. The movie seems to take a pause here; on the one hand, we get Detective Mulligan, who’s still alive and stuck in Area 51 with a symbiote of his own, explaining the plot if Knull escapes his space prison. On the other hand, we get a musical number from the hippie family, with Eddie looking uncomfortable while Venom sings along inside his head. Honestly, this van ride scene is all over the place and is pretty campy, but it does calm down from the last parts and it has some genuinely good scenes where Eddie and Venom talk honestly with each other, which is nice.
When they arrive in Las Vegas, Eddie and Venom split with the hippies and manage to get into the casino of the Paris Hotel, where they run into Mrs Chen (Peggy Lu – Dealing with Dad, Rock Bottom) who used to run their local shop in San Francisco and possibly still does. They go to her penthouse suite, which she won somehow, and the movie interrupts its own plot again to share an ABBA dance number. Don’t get me wrong, I quite like Dancing Queen even though it’s very overplayed, but seeing Mrs Chen and Venom (who’s taken over) dancing around her suite is a bizarre experience. It’s also hard to tell if this is just to move the story along or if the writers really did forget that Venom already explained the consequences of being out in full in public for long. As such, Strickland’s men have located them through the hotel CCTV, and as Venom is fully revealed, the Codex is visible to the woodchipper alien, so they both turn up nearly at once. The woodchipper alien is “killed” temporarily, but it can regenerate over time. Eddie and Venom are captured, separated and taken to Area 51.
I haven’t mentioned Dr. Teddy Paine (Juno Temple – The Dark Knight Rises, Maleficent) yet. She’s in charge(?) of the secret symbiote lab under Area 51, and you’re supposed to care about her and her motivations; I don’t, and it’s probably why I haven’t mentioned her until now. She’s been popping up in scenes here and there, one of the first ones being a nightmare scene where she watches her brother get struck by lightning and killed. Her brother’s dream of working for NASA is why she’s a scientist today. Maybe I’m too cynical, but half of her plot line is seemingly shared with another character, Sadie (Clark Backo – Supernatural [tv series], Happy Place), making Dr Paine quite wooden. Sadie seems to have more humane awareness than Dr. Paine and recognises what will happen if Eddie and Venom aren’t reunited, having also heard Detective Mulligan’s warnings about Knull.
When the Venom symbiote is taken for storage in a separate lab, she secretly picks it up. She waits for an opportune moment when Strickland is about to kill Eddie as payback for losing some of his men to the woodchipper alien. Venom takes over as Eddie and is about to launch an attack on Strickland when the woodchipper alien crashes through the ceiling and demolishes a load of people, including Mulligan, which is a pretty sad ending for him and not a good use of Stephen Graham’s acting abilities. Also, wasn’t this part of the lab under a massive rocky hill that the woodchipper alien broke straight through? Oh well, it’s unstoppable, I guess.
The others run back to the central part of the lab, and Sadie encourages Dr. Paine to release the symbiotes, who then bond with different people around the room to fight off the woodchipper alien, although most perish. As the fight breaks into the outside world, Eddie runs into the hippie family, who somehow managed to break into Area 51 so they could see some aliens; they get a face full of them and hippie dad of the year Martin nearly gets his family killed. Venom and the other symbiotes saved them, though.
Meanwhile, Knull has located the Codex he needs to escape and sends loads more of his garden machinery aliens through a portal to up the ante. Realising there’s no way out of this, and that one of the pair must die to ensure the Codex is destroyed, Venom separates from Eddie and somehow merges all of the Peter Jensen (inventor of the woodchipper) aliens into one giant blob which he can just about move. Let’s not dwell on how exactly that works given he’s not been able to do this before. Despite my sarcasm again, there are some genuinely touching moments, and the scene delivers a sense of finality that this duo going under the name ‘Lethal Protector’ is at its end.
Venom encourages an injured Strickland to detonate the acid tanks that were on base; earlier in the film, we saw them decommissioning Area 51 by melting things with acid. I wonder if this is how secret installations are actually purged. Anyway, the tanks blow up and Eddie, who Venom shielded with some debris, passes out from his injuries. He wakes up in hospital and is told that his criminal record has been cleared because of his and Venom’s heroism, but he must never tell anyone. Then, the movie ends with a montage of the duo throughout the three movies set to some sad music, and there’s a mid-credit cutscene where Knull makes a threatening speech. There’s also a post-credit cutscene where a small part of the Venom symbiote left over in a lab tube attaches to a roach to begin the whole thing again, probably.
Tom Hardy has made it pretty clear that this is the end of Sony’s Venom series of films, although I believe he’s willing to play the character again in the future, or at least he hasn’t written it off. That’s where I’m at with this film, too; I want to see Hardy play Eddie Brock/Venom again, as they were funny, interesting and heartfelt, but this felt like a letdown that I don’t want to rewatch. Honestly, Eddie and Venom were the best parts of the film, except for the ABBA number in the casino, which was too far.
The whole film feels like it’s stalling and starting throughout its story, and there are a few too many inconsistencies for me to rate this with a high rating or even a medium rating. It’s better than the diabolical mess that was 2023’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, but it still earns one of my lowest movie scores yet. Venom: The Last Dance has some touching emotional moments, as I’ve said, but I think it’s missed the mark. I’m glad they fixed some of the issues from previous movies, mainly the level of on-screen violence, which felt like enough. The film was quite fun in some areas, but no amount of CGI blood and monsters it couldn’t save it from its lacklustre story. It’s made over $300m at the box office so far, though, so it brought in cash.
Runtime: 109 minutes
Year of release: 2024
Director: Kelly Marcel
Story writers: Kelly Marcel, Tom Hardy
Music: Dan Deacon
Producers: Kelly Marce, Tom Hardy, Avi Arad, Matt Tomalch, Amy Pascal, Hutch Parker
Production: Columbia Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, Hardy Son & Baker, Arad Productions, Matt Tomalch Productions, Pascal Pictures, TSG Entertainment, Hutch Parker Entertainment
Pros:
- Tom Hardy nails his performances as Eddie and Venom
- Some scenes are genuinely emotional moments
- Some of the dialogue (mostly Venom’s) is quite funny
Cons:
- The story yo-yos from one extreme to another with almost reckless speed
- Most of the characters were forgettable
- Knull was very underdeveloped given that he’s continually hyped as the main villain
Rating:
