‘Venom: The Last Dance’ Review: Tom Hardy Wraps up His Marvel Symbiote Trilogy With a Steroidal Buddy Movie

Over the course of three Venom movies, Tom Hardy has done a lot to bring a modicum of gravitas to a profoundly silly story about a parasitic alien whose place in the Marvel universe cosmology has never made a lot of sense. At least to those not schooled in all things MCU. The fact that the trilogy has avoided taking itself too seriously has been both its saving grace and its limitation. It’s hard to invest too much in the usual bombast and mayhem and CG smackdowns when the films come off as goofball larks with way fewer teeth than the giant pointed chompers on the title character.

On the other hand, Hardy brings sufficient charm (and witty voice work) to his symbiote-inhabited character’s internal battle between id and superego to make each entry diverting enough, even if they leave little aftertaste. And so it goes with Venom: The Last Dance, which caps the trilogy by going gleefully out on its own.

Graduating from her role as a writer and producer on 2018’s Venom and 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage to first-time feature director here, Kelly Marcel jettisons any Spider-Man adjacency and tries her hand at something no one on the preceding films has managed to do. Working from a story she developed with Hardy, Marcel gives Venom — as the goopy alien organism that took up residence in the body of Hardy’s former investigative TV reporter Eddie Brock is known — an origin story of sorts.

In a hastily sketched prologue, we meet a straggly-haired ghoul known to comic-book aficionados as Knull (an unrecognizable Andy Serkis, director of the trilogy’s last entry) who identifies himself with lugubrious grandiosity as “god of the void.” Seething about his symbiote children having betrayed and imprisoned him in some dark cavern in a distant universe, Knull dispatches a bunch of fearsome creatures called xenophages, giant spidery-reptilian things that love to snack on symbiotes.

But Knull doesn’t just want those ingrate offspring slaughtered. He needs a key in their possession to escape his prison. “Find me the Codex!” he bellows at the critters. Of course, the Codex is not to be found on any random symbiote. No prizes for guessing who has it.

The story picks up with Eddie and Venom drunk in a bar in Mexico, having gone on the run after eliminating Woody Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady and his symbiote, Carnage, in the last movie. Their epic clash apparently alerted Knull to the presence of symbiotes on Earth. An irrelevant multiverse detour lands Eddie and Venom back in the bar some time later, primarily so the symbiote can manipulate his host into channeling Tom Cruise in Cocktail — with those slithery extra limbs doing maximum damage to the tune of “Tequila,” naturally.

Venom jumping in on the sole lyric of that 1950s jazz instrumental is a good indication of what’s to come, as Hardy and Marcel milk the odd-couple dynamic and jokey banter for maximum laughs. The symbiote at this point is so playful and quippy he’s practically Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, minus the urge to eat his one true friend. But Venom sobers up in every sense of the word as the story progresses, pointing toward what seems an inevitable separation of host and guest and yielding moments of tender sentimentality.

First, however, Eddie learns he’s wanted for questioning concerning the apparent death of Detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham) in San Francisco. Eddie and Venom try hotfooting it to New York City, but a skirmish with a xenophage while they’re hitching a ride on a passenger plane lands them in the Nevada desert instead.

They turn out to be near Area 51, a recently decommissioned site about to be destroyed, where the government has been conducting controversial tests on aliens. In a secret containment facility 100 feet below the surface, where something called the Imperium Program is being carried out, a couple of thin secondary characters are introduced, played by over-qualified actors not given enough to do.

One is Army Special Forces brass Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and the other is symbiote whisperer scientist Dr. Payne (Juno Temple). Dr. Payne believes the aliens have come to Earth fleeing something and looking for a safe haven, but Strickland is convinced their goal is migration and planetary occupation.

UFO-obsessed hippie tourist Martin (Rhys Ifans) and his family give Eddie a lift in their camper van along the Extraterrestrial Highway, where they’re hoping to see some alien action. They get more than they bargained for once a xenophage sniffs out Venom, and Knull sends a whole lot more of them to clean up. And to bring back that damn Codex — not to be confused with the identically termed but narratively unrelated Codex that Michael Shannon’s General Zod was screaming for in Man of Steel.

This is the point at which the action explodes into chaos and Marcel’s inexperience in the director’s chair starts to show. The rampaging xenophages are a formidable weapon of mass destruction, but the film sacrifices some excitement by giving Venom only nameless, faceless adversaries — unless you count the gnarly god of the void stewing away in space.

Eddie and Venom get almost sidelined in all this. Much of the resistance is left to symbiotes released from the lab, which instantly find compatible hosts in the Imperium staffers and occasionally manage to escape the ravenous jaws of the xenophages. The most memorable of them — OK, the only memorable one — is Dr. Payne’s lab colleague Sadie (Clark Backo), who unleashes some serious badassery once she’s transformed.

This being the concluding chapter of a trilogy, it all leads to an emotional catharsis that will no doubt satisfy fans of the earlier movies, with a sweet touch of cheesy humor to offset the melancholy. But the only thing that really matters on the way there is the affectionately tetchy rapport between Eddie and Venom, who have gotten progressively more comfortable in each other’s skins over the year they’ve been together. (Though I can’t say I didn’t miss the grounding presence of Michelle Williams’ Anne, the lost love of Eddie’s life, now completely out of the picture.)

Much of the shtick involves Eddie playing straight man to the symbiote cutup, whether introducing Venom to gambling in a funny scene at a Vegas slot machine (“Lady Luck is a fickle slut!”) or enduring a family singalong to “Space Oddity,” accompanied by Martin strumming a guitar in the van. There’s less of Venom taking over at will than Eddie giving his alien pal the nod whenever superhuman strength is required — for instance, in an enjoyable early scene with a band of Mexicans running illegal dog fights. “Hola, bitches,” says Venom, as the tentacles unfurl to take them out.

It makes for an amusing detour when they meet San Francisco convenience store owner Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) in Vegas, where she has become such a high roller at a hotel casino that she commands the penthouse suite. That allows for a daffy interlude in which Mrs. Chen and Venom cut a rug to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” It’s cute, but doesn’t exactly up the stakes in terms of impending doom.

The Venom movies have all been somewhat constricted by their PG-13 guidelines, meaning the dangers are invariably a tad muted and the casualties barely register. The chief exception to that in The Last Dance is a pulse-racing sequence in which Strickland’s SWAT team, armed with lots of cool gadgetry, pursues Eddie down whitewater rapids toward a waterfall in a bid to capture Venom.

That scene also gives the effects team license to do what they do best. Sure, the xenophages are impressive creepy-crawlies, but the main attraction is the transformation of the symbiotes from writhing cellular blobs into gleaming colossi with killer grins and tongues that put Gene Simmons to shame. Venom’s shape-shifting abilities alone provide plenty of entertainment — He’s a parachute! He’s a horse! He’s a fish! — that should appeal especially to kids in the audience.

The action is bigger and louder, if at times messier, than that of its predecessors, but this is also the cuddliest of the three movies. It reveals both Eddie and Venom to be old softies in their protectiveness toward Martin’s kids (Hala Finley and Dash McCloud) and even more so in their cozy companionship, a symbiosis that’s almost a marriage.