Venom: The Last Dance forgets its signature moves and drunkenly stumbles through the grand finale

Venom: The Last Dance. // Courtesy Columbia Pictures

I want to start, dear reader, by letting you know that I’m coming from a place of love. I thought 2018’s Venom was a delightfully shaggy and bizarre affair, restaurant lobster tank bathtub and all. 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage was kind of all over the place, but had its charms. The breakfast scene! Venom wearing glow sticks at a club where Little Simz is performing! Continued shenanigans with Mrs. Chen!

All that said, I take no pleasure in telling you that Venom: The Last Dance is a hot, steaming pile of garbage. 

Actually, scratch that, it’s not even hot. Hot garbage would imply effort, and Venom: The Last Dance is so low-energy that it doesn’t qualify. This movie is cold garbage, the kind that should’ve been taken out to the curb a week ago, but you forgot, so it’s been sitting in the can, stinking up the joint. Eddie Brock and his crass alien parasite boyfriend deserve better.

Most of the problems with the film come from the writing, which sacrifices any interesting character development or chemistry-building for piling on unnecessary exposition that would be better served through showing, not telling. Director Kelly Marcel co-wrote the script—and the script for Let There Be Carnage—alongside Eddie Brock himself, Tom Hardy, which implies this is a franchise they enjoy working on. One has to believe the movie’s clunkier bits are the result of overzealous studio notes. Let’s be charitable and credit the film’s erratic editing to that as well.

How clunky is the writing? We start with an exposition monologue (never a good sign) from the movie’s big bad, a tyrannical villain-in-the-sky who looks a bit like Geralt of Rivia, but whose name we never learn, and whose face we never see. We only know he’s been imprisoned by Venom’s fellow symbiotes, and the only thing that keeps him in jail is a key called the Codex. In actual parlance, a codex is a book, but for some reason here it’s a magical energy MacGuffin of indeterminate form that’s conveniently embedded in Venom’s body. 

But that’s okay, because you’re not here for stuff like correct language usage, or consistency. You’re here for brain-numbing (brain-eating?) fun.

There is not, however, enough of that fun. 

Venom: The Last Dance. // Courtesy Columbia Pictures

For every wacky adventure, Eddie and Venom find themselves in as they try to escape some nasty sentinel beasties that what’s-his-face has sent down to earth to retrieve the codex, we spend twice as long hearing uninteresting info-dumps as meandering as the run-on sentences in this review. This is the kind of stuff you hear in a cutaway scene of 30 Rock, to the point where, eventually, I stopped seeing Juno Temple’s face when her Area 51 symbiote scientist character was talking and started seeing Jenna Maroney’s.

Are there things to giggle at in Venom: The Last Dance? Absolutely. Venom takes over a horse, which is cool. There’s a cute cocktail-making disaster in a bar run by Dani Rojas from Ted Lasso. Eddie keeps losing his shoes. There’s other stuff to laugh at too, but those laughs are unintentional. During a fight scene, one character laments over the death of a security guard whose name, to that point, we did not know, and who appeared for maybe half a second in an earlier scene. Temple’s character has a backstory, but there’s so little in her character that registers that it’s not really necessary, so the flashback detailing that backstory feels especially shoehorned in.

You can see where I’m going with this. 

In a series where messiness is encouraged—even one of its movies’ defining charms—Venom: The Last Dance is unforgivably sloppy. One of the worst things a movie can do is coast on the belief that its dum-dum audience will lap up anything it dishes out. 

Everyone involved in this bummer of a (presumed) series ending is smart enough to know better.

Venom: The Last Dance. // Courtesy Columbia Pictures