Venom The Last Dance movie review: A swan-song that isn’t exactly on song 

Venom The Last Dance movie review

Film: Venom: The Last Dance
Cast: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Stephen Graham, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach, Rhys Ifans, Clark Backo
Director: Kelly Marcel
Rating: 2.5/5
Runtime: 109 min

The Marvel Comics character Venom is back again in a sequel to Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021). It's the fifth film in Sony's Spider-Man Universe (SSU), and is co-written by Hardy and directed by Kelly Marcel. This film marks the directorial debut of Kelly Marcel, who wrote the first two Venom movies. If you did not like the earlier iterations, you probably won't like this one either. The film is a rather messy buddy extravagance that as expected, doesn't make any sense. At 109 min runtime it isn't a very long over-indulgence but it still manages to grate on your nerves at times.

Tom Hardy gets back into groove playing goofy with his symbiotic shenanigans in this ‘Last Dance', the third and supposedly final movie in the trilogy. The titular Marvel Comics villain-turned-antihero, Eddie Brock and Venom, his parasitic companion, are on the run as soldiers, scientists, other symbiotes, and an alien attempt to track them down. Yeah…turn your brains off for the last time…

After the events of ‘Let There Be Carnage' Brock is hiding out in Mexico. But upon learning from TV news about his ‘wanted' status in the US, he promptly decides to return to New York City… but instead wanders through the American southwest. Eddie obviously hasn't managed to sort himself out enough to give us a plausible enough experience.

As compared to the first two prequels, this one is slightly better. It is fast paced and keeps dumping short bursts of subject matter throughout its exposition. But the series doesn't gain much from its existence. The half-baked multiple storylines make the plotting seem chaotic. The introduction of new symbiotes with distinctive personalities, is an element that manages to broaden the intrigue and interest here though. The writing is fairly inventive in its efforts to get the Symbiote to indulge in comic face-offs. The CGI is also more coherently drawn - with an eye to silliness and fun.

The savage and brutal duo from the comic book is missing here. Eddie and Venom are now shown as comedic anti-heroes, and their ‘inane' banter tickles the funny bone intermittently.The jokes lose their steam mid-way and become repetitive.This film is much darker in its humor than its predecessors but its not laugh-out-loud variety. For the fans, the writing here will seem hilarious - but it's actually quite absurd, deranged and sometimes childish. The surreal sequence with Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) and Eddie in a Las Vegas casino comes at you from left field and it feels totally out of place. The action at times is pretty solid but most-times the ambition here is to achieve a childish level of mindless glee. There's also some emotion to be had in the third act - it ends on a senitment-heavy, cheesy note. The eclectic music preferences fail to rouse up the elements as it were and the two post-credit sequences meant to give you a hint of where the franchise is headed feels like a cop-out.

This final chapter of the trilogy with an anti-hero invested with a wisecracking alien parasite, is fairly well paced, has whacky performances, crusty visual effects and a story that enhances fan service. It's also quite flawed and fails to raise the bar enough to be certified as unabashedly entertaining.