Venom: The Last Dance stays firmly in its ridiculous lane

hough neither of Sony’s previous standalone Venom movies were cinematic gems, their strange blend of Odd Couple humor and bloodless body horror were enough to put them squarely in so-bad-they’re-kinda-fun territory. It was hard to imagine a Venom feature — let alone a franchise — really working without a Spider-Man in the mix. But the box-office success of the films made it clear that something about Tom Hardy’s take on the lethal protector was working for audiences and all but ensured that Sony would go for a third installment.

Venom: The Last Dance from writer / director Kelly Marcel is neither better nor worse than its predecessors. It feels like a film that’s trying to stick to the beats it knows it can pull off well. Instead of diving into the multiverse to wow you with crossovers, the movie plays to the franchise’s strengths with a story that’s mostly about the ups and downs of being in a long-term relationship. And while The Last Dance doesn’t exactly deliver on the iffy but intriguing comic madness Sony has been teasing, it does bring this gooey, gory bit of ridiculous adaptation to a fitting end.

As chaotic as the first two Venom films were, they were also a fairly straightforward account of how disgraced journalist Eddie Brock’s (Hardy) life was repeatedly upended by the arrival of Venom (also Hardy), one of many parasitic aliens that crash-landed on Earth. Unlike other symbiote / host bonds that proved to be fatal, Eddie and Venom grew stronger because of their connection and found purpose in one another as they grew accustomed to sharing a body. The two had their fights and hit a big emotional rough patch, but they were always able to work things out when faced with a new deadly threat. The Last Dance picks up soon after Let There Be Carnage, which ended on a cliffhanger in another dimension.

At first, it seems like the movie is using its multiversal connection to the MCU to pivot from its narrative past and start things over in a world filled with Marvel-branded superheroes. But The Last Dance instead decides to keep things focused on just how much has happened to Eddie and Venom in their universe during the surprisingly short amount of time they’ve been together.

Especially after Deadpool & Wolverine, the way The Last Dance basically gives the multiverse the middle finger is kind of refreshing and makes it feel like Sony and Marcel — who also wrote the first two Venom films — are trying to stay in a very specific lane, similar to Madame Web’s.

As much as fans might want to see Venom in New York beefing with Spider-Man, that’s just not what this franchise has been building to (yet). These are films about a haggard failson trying to hold his life together with the help of a wise-cracking goo monster who longs for the taste of human brains. And The Last Dance brings Eddie and Venom’s story to a close by confronting them with the consequences of their past adventures.

With the government finally realizing how many strange deaths and symbiote incidents he’s connected to, Eddie is on the run somewhere in Mexico as The Last Dance first opens. It seems like there’s nowhere Venom and Eddie can hide without special-ops soldier Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his team finding them. But the duo figure — sort of unreasonably — that they might have a chance of disappearing into the shadows if they can just make it to New York City.

Because it’s the culmination of a trilogy, there’s an understandable logic to the fugitive aspects of The Last Dance’s story (which Hardy contributed to). After blowing up a rocket in Venom and creating a new serial killer symbiote in Let There Be Carnage, it makes sense that Eddie and Venom would become high-profile targets forced to go off the grid. But it’s harder to follow the narrative thread being unspooled in The Last Dance’s larger plot about a symbiote invasion.

Much in the same way Let There Be Carnage introduced its Cletus Kasady with a lore-dense info dump, The Last Dance tries its best to explain the whole deal with the symbiote god Knull (Andy Serkis) through a CGI-heavy chunk of exposition pulled from the comics. Knull created the symbiotes, who then betrayed him by trapping him in the center of their homeworld. And after eons of being imprisoned and thinking of ways to punish his parasitic children, Knull suddenly realizes that Eddie and Venom’s unique symbiosis has created the MacGuffin necessary to set him free.

There’s an irony to the way The Last Dance cracks a Thanos joke in its opening act and then awkwardly attempts to establish Knull as its own throne-bound big bad. The movie constantly reminds you how scared Venom is of Knull as a way of making its alien villain seem like a threat that has always been lurking out in space. But Knull’s plan — he can send other kinds of monsters through very Doctor Strange-like portals to find things for him — is so contrived that his presence in The Last Dance feels like the result of there not being all that many Venom-related characters Sony holds the cinematic rights to.

That “scraping of the bottom of the barrel” quality grows stronger as The Last Dance drops in even more symbiotes whose names are never mentioned but comic fans may recognize because of their color schemes. And while Knull’s alien goons are very cool / terrifying visually, the danger they’re meant to represent feels hollow because the film knows that it can’t exactly afford to kill off its emotional center.

As was the case with the previous films, Hardy’s performances as Eddie and Venom are, depending on how you feel about goofy slapstick comedy, The Last Dance’s biggest strength. While his accent is still shaky as hell, Hardy brings a believable weariness to Eddie this time around that feels right for a man who’s been living with an alien infection for about a year. And Venom is even more subtly emotive in ways that emphasize how much more deeply connected he and Eddie have become during their time together.

Even though its plot is weak, its supporting characters are woefully underdeveloped, and its visual effects leave much to be desired, Venom: The Last Dance almost works when it’s just Eddie and Venom getting into shenanigans or reflecting on their life together. That isn’t nearly enough to make for a solid film, but again, solid films have never been the Venom franchise’s forte, and Sony isn’t switching up the formula this late in the game. If you were down to clown with Venom and got a kick out of Let There Be Carnage, The Last Dance will probably keep you mildly entertained. But for folks who could never understand why Sony has been churning these things out, the only real appeal here is that the studio seems to be finished — at least for now.

Venom: The Last Dance also stars Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Peggy Lu, Clark Backo, Cristo Fernández, and Stephen Graham. The film hits theaters on October 25th.