109 min | PG-13 | October 25, 2024 | Sony Pictures
The Venom trilogy ends with a whimper disguised as a bang. Tom Hardy talks to himself for two hours while the plot happens around him.
Eddie Brock and his symbiote Venom are on the run. A military task force is hunting symbiotes. An alien entity called Knull is sending creatures to Earth to retrieve a codex hidden inside Venom. Eddie drives across the country. He stops at various locations. He meets various people. Things explode. The plot of the third Venom film is a road trip interrupted by CGI action sequences that have no weight or consequence. Kelly Marcel, who wrote the previous films and makes her directorial debut here, structures the narrative as a buddy comedy between Eddie and Venom with apocalyptic stakes bolted on. The comedy works intermittently. The stakes never land.
Tom Hardy plays Eddie and voices Venom and the dual performance remains the only reason these films exist. Hardy commits to the bit with an energy that the material does not deserve. The bickering between Eddie and Venom has a lived-in quality that three films of practice provides. Hardy is funny when the script lets him be. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a military scientist hunting symbiotes with a seriousness that the film cannot support. Juno Temple plays a scientist at an Area 51 facility with a quirkiness that feels manufactured. Rhys Ifans plays a hippie with a symbiote horse. Stephen Graham appears briefly. The supporting cast exists to fill scenes between Eddie talking to himself.
The visual effects are competent and forgettable. The symbiote action follows the same pattern as the previous films. Black tendrils extend and retract. Bodies contort. Alien creatures made of digital goo collide with other creatures made of digital goo. Marcel shoots the action clearly enough but there is no visual imagination in the set pieces. The road trip cinematography captures American landscapes without doing anything interesting with them. The score by Theodore Shapiro is functional. The sound design during the symbiote sequences has become routine across three films.
Sony’s Spider-Man Universe has been a franchise in search of a purpose. Venom was the only character who generated enough audience goodwill to sustain multiple films and even that goodwill has a limit. The Last Dance is that limit. Hardy has given these films everything he has. The films have given him nothing in return except the freedom to be weird in a blockbuster. That freedom produces moments of genuine entertainment scattered across two hours of narrative incoherence. The trilogy ends not with resolution but with exhaustion.