Venom: The Last Dance Review | A Hodgepodge Ending to Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock Stint

The third installment of the Venom franchise, Venom: The Last Dance, which concludes the character arc of Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock, feels like a hastily assembled superhero flick with this worn-out feel to its credit. From the opening monologue that has the evil guy Knull literally explaining to us what the fight you are about to witness is all about, there is absolutely zero gist in this Kelly Marcel movie that goes after generic superhero movie stuff and a lot of counter-dialogue humor to make the whole experience light and fun.

So, after the whole multiverse stuff that we saw in the MCU films, Eddie Brock is back in his own universe, and here, the authorities are in search of him for the death of Patrick Mulligan. Meanwhile, Knull, the creator of symbiotes, has summoned his army to go and find the codex, which is like the coexisting state of Eddie and Venom. So, with both parties getting hunted by forces of their own nature, they are on the run to save their lives, and what we see in Venom: The Last Dance is that.

The hastiness in assembling a story is very evident from the word go. They want to reset the whole stuff, and you have this comical bit at the beginning of the movie with the Mexican bartender. The humor in most parts of the film feels like a damage control thing, like how DC hired Whedon to Marvel-ize Justice League. The events in this movie are happening over a very short period of time, and even there, they are building certain set pieces just to make it look grand rather than the story demanding it.

The writing is the very obvious problem here. The beats are ultra generic, and you can sort of sense the purpose and arc of almost all the characters, even if you don’t have any idea about these characters through the comics. The entry and exit of certain set pieces, like that whole fight on top of a plane, is staged in an extremely lackluster way. At one point, they added this hippy family who is going to Area 51, which is about to get decommissioned in a few days’ time. It was a subplot that was added mainly for the sake of humor and for having someone totally helpless for the hero to save. There is this effort to make the final moments of the movie a mega showdown featuring all the symbiotes, and again, the staging lacks the emotional connection.

In his last outing as Eddie Brock, Tom Hardy maintains that confused and exhausted body language. Kelly Marcel, who wrote the movie along with Hardy, is trying to give him some moments of swagger in a casino scene. But that entire sequence felt bloated, just to showcase some Venom characteristics and to include Mrs. Chen in the story. Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is Baron Mordo in the other universe, is playing Rex Strickland here. In the comics, this character has certain backstories connected to the Vietnam War. But here, he was reduced to a mere soldier who wasn’t irreplaceable. Rhys Ifans plays the role of the hippy, and it was more like what if his character from Notting Hill now has a family.

At the end of the movie, there is this montage of visuals from all three films with Maroon 5’s Memories track in the backdrop as Eddie reminisces about his time with his buddy. The franchise, on the whole, has been on the mediocre side, and this last one felt like a sloppy effort to conclude the character arc. Even though the song has a great emotional quotient attached to it, I doubt the possibility of it having the same impact on people who have seen all three films in the Venom trilogy.