Director: Kelly Marcel
Cast: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach, Stephen Graham, Andy Serkis, Clark Backo
Plot: Eddie Brock and Venom are on the run, having been accused of murdering a cop. In addition, they’re being hunted by an unstoppable alien monster and a secret military organisation who are studying the Symbiotes.
Review: Cards on the table, the Venom series of movies has never been my cup of tea. Granted, they’re a shining beacon a creative comic book film-making compared to its peers in the Sony Spider-Man Universe (That Currently Doesn’t Have a Spider-Man), but I’ve never been excited about the next instalment of everyone’s black goo monster. Now we arrive at the final part of the trilogy, time to see it the Tom Hardy double-act can stick the landing.
We open on a sinister looking figure sitting in a great throne deep in space, with long white hair and a snarling voice. With voice-over, he tells us that he is Knull, god of the Symbiotes, a terrible cosmic being who commands the void, and will bring death and destruction to all worlds. After his Symbiotes turned against him, Knull has been imprisoned and waiting for the chance to seize the Codex, which will free him. Now that he knows Venom has the Codex, he sends his newly created alien killing machines to Earth in the first step to conquering the known universe.
Now forget all that, because Knull (Serkis) isn’t going to be in this movie. This much touted character introduction is Sony’s attempt to get themselves a Thanos, someone who’ll sit in a big Space Chair and say menacing things as a set-up for some big cross-over down the line. The big difference is that Marvel at build up a cast of beloved characters before setting up Thanos, while Sony has…Morbius and Madame Web.
Any, back on Earth…or Earth-616…Eddie (Hardy) and Venom are getting drunk and talking about Thanos like we last saw him. He promptly zaps back to the Sonyverse where he has been accused of killing Detective Mulligan (Graham) and is on the run. The truth is that Mulligan is alive and bonded with Toxin, a green Venom, and held by Military Man Strickland (Ejiofor) and Science Lady (Temple) is ‘Area 55’. They’ve managed to collect up a couple of Symbiotes of various colours and are intent on doing something with them.
Into the mix we get one of Knull’s many alien killing machines, a mix of the Predator, the Xenomorph and the Zerg, to catch Venom. It seems that when a Symbiote saves the life of its bonded host, it creates the Codex, which the PredaXenoZerg can sense. While this alien designs didn’t wow us with originality, their whole organic threshing machine mouth is pretty rad. It never gets dull watching them eating people and Symbiotes with the diced remains blowing out the back of their heads like a woodchipper.
One major complaint we had with the previous Venom adventures was the choice to pit him against Symbiotes. Watching one goo monsters slap around with a slightly different coloured goo monsters does not make for an exciting finale. Although the PredaXenoZergs do keep things fresh and more fun, this movie adds a Skittle’s packet worth of different coloured Venoms to jump into the ending for a minutes before they get killed off.
Ultimately, what has been holding the Sonyverse back is their inability to really pin down what they want this to be. They seem desperate to make themselves a part of the Marvel canon, to the point that Madame Web cast members tagged Marvel Studios when they posted the trailer for their film, but they can’t find a way to make this bunch of villains into our heroes. They’re never antiheroes, they’re just inconsistent. Eddie goes after a gang of low-lifes for the crime of animal mistreatment so Venom can literally bite all their heads off. An hour later we’re looking at Eddie staring guiltily at his hands because he had to shoot a soldier to stop them drowning him because he can’t believe he killed someone.
In their effort to try and make all their ideas work, we wind up with some very clumsy and awkward storytelling. We open with a long scene of a new character explaining how he created the Symbiotes but they betrayed him and imprisoned him and his new aliens will hunt them down in the Amazon where his mother was studying spiders before she died, then that gets shoved aside. Next, Science Lady turns up, we see a dream of her losing her twin brother and how she would follow his ambitions of space study…and then she tells the next three people she meets the same thing in case we missed it. This turns out to be a big set-up for her becoming a Purple Venom, but that doesn’t do anything in this movie either. One audience member suggested that it must be everyone’s first day at work since they’re all explaining their backstories and motivation to each other.
For all this movie introduces to the lore, it’s really hard to know what the plan is from here. The Last Dance is specifically set-up to close off the Venom story, audiences thoroughly rejected Morbius and Madame Web…we’re not sure who the upcoming Kraven The Animal Lover is expected to team-up with to fight Knull, who popped up again at the end to snarl at the camera. There’s still that blob of goo left in the MCU, no doubt that will play a role in bringing their only successful product back for sequels.
There’s nothing we can fault with the way the movie looks or the performances. It’s a comic book movie that does what it is expected to do. What holds it back is the simplistic script and a lack of clear direction towards an overall universe that Sony is dying to make happen. Full credit to Kelly Marcel, making her first foray into directing after writing the three movies in the series. There are much more experienced directors in the business who can’t pull together a competent blockbuster release like this. We also want to give a special mention to that one soldier who pops up a few times to deliver lines in the most dull, bland delivery we’ve ever seen in a major release. Weirdly captivating, that guy.
Rating: FIVE out of TEN