This is a quick and honest review of my time experiencing Venom: The Last Dance in theaters. If you haven’t seen this film yet, you should check it out! This review will also contain spoilers for certain sections of the film, but if you don’t care, continue reading.
The Good
The best parts of Venom: The Last Dance is when Tom Hardy is flexing his acting chops as Eddie Brock without Venom interfering with the story. Those parts of the film are so little as Venom is barely away from Eddie Brock. Another thing I enjoyed was the exploration of the symbiotes with characters like Toxin, Agony, Lasher, Scorn, etc.
The B-plot scenes featured in Area 51 were my favorite parts of the film because it felt like this franchise had something to say for the first time and those scenes reminded me of a Sci-Fi/Horror film just like something you would see out of the ‘Alien’ franchise. I wanted more “good” out of this last installment and unfortunately it was the opposite.
The Bad
The frustrating part of this movie is that it has too many plots going on at the same time and fails to balance its tone. On one end it’s the buddy-comedy that we’ve known to be accustomed to and then it tries way too hard to be dramatic in the B-plot with newly introduced characters such as Dr. Payne and Rex Strickland, played by Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
They try to do a backstory for Juno Temple’s character regarding an accident that happened to her and her brother and it brings the film down because it doesn’t go anywhere at all and quite frankly didn’t need to be in the movie anyways. Venom as a character is annoying and I was more interested when he wasn’t speaking, which is unfortunate because the symbiote is the selling point.
Knull is wasted as the main villain and sits on a chair the entire time. Although I appreciated what they tried to do with the lore of how the symbiotes were created, it ultimately was an ad for another movie that Sony wants to desperately set up with no real weight or emotion behind it.
Final Thoughts
Venom: The Last Dance is a bad film, with a couple of scenes that made me laugh, and one emotional scene that I wished this trilogy had more of. Tom Hardy couldn’t even save this film with his acting due to its messy editing, weak script, action that feels all over the place, pointless side characters, and wasted villain in Knull.
General audiences will definitely eat this movie up as “internationally”, Venom: The Last Dance is projected to make $180M globally in its opening weekend, but I ask you the viewer who is reading this, do you hold Sony Pictures to the same standard as Marvel Studios or are you just turning your brain off with the Spider-Man villain movies? We need to have a discussion about Sony Pictures handling the Spidey IP, because the longer this goes, it will only do more damage to the Spider-Man brand and comic book movies as a whole.
Kraven the Hunter is next on the list coming out on December 13, and I’m lowering my expectations for it. If that movie cannot deliver critically and financially, then Sony Pictures needs to look at themselves in the mirror creatively with the Spider-Man IP heading into 2025 and beyond.
