Tom Hardy wraps up his alien bromance trilogy
One of the fun in-jokes of the Venom series is that Tom Hardy, who plays Marvel Comics character Eddie Brock in the movie franchise, is also lending his magisterial, id-driven voice to Venom, the mayhem-frequent symbiote alien who’s locked inside him. So Hardy’s talking to himself up there onscreen most of the time.
Venom is an outlier from the MCU, sometimes crossing over with Peter Parker and Spider-Man (through Sony Pictures) via those pesky post-credit sequences. In that sense, the three Venom movies have some latitude to play around as much as they want, and that makes them a somewhat guilty pleasure. Laughs and carnage arrive in equal measure. Sure, it’s fun to see Hardy play regular guy Eddie, an investigative journalist on the run since 2018’s Venom. Hardy, a fan of the comics, can slip into a likeably average American simulacrum as easily as his character morphs into Venom—a sometimes tetchy, punctilious alien who’s prone to the simple pleasures of Earth life, like gazing at the Statue of Liberty and eating human bad guys whole.
While the previous Venom movies played out Eddie’s storyline with Michelle Williams as a (now seemingly lost) love interest, this conclusion to the trilogy mostly settles into an alien bromance road trip movie, with Brock/Venom waking up from a Mexican border drunk to find they’re being pursued, not only by military types from Area 51—now supposedly decommissioned—but also a swarm of nasty symbiote creatures unleashed by Knull (Andy Serkis), a Marvel supervillain who may play a bigger part in the future MCU.
Though Venom: The Last Dance contains a middle act teeming with fun sequences—Eddie and Venom commandeer a loose bronco and ride like the wind through the desert; they get hijacked on a jet by a nasty symbiote; Venom even gets an ABBA dance moment with Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) in a Vegas penthouse apartment—there’s not a huge amount of meat on the bones, story-wise. Venom and Eddie cross paths with a family led by hippie Rhys Ifans in a VW van, heading to Area 51 to “see some aliens.” And Juno Temple arrives early as a scientist at the military site where captured symbiotes are stored for study.
With Venom writer Kelly Marcel stepping in as director after Serkis was elsewhere engaged, the pacing is frenetic and freewheeling. The usually lively Temple (from Ted Lasso) is given very little to do in the script or onscreen, playing a female scientist who lost her brother in a lightning storm as a child, and now has the job he always wanted. She mostly looks dour and stunned, as does Clark Backo, a good actress mostly wasted here. Strange, considering the movie was written and directed by a woman. You get the sense that certain scenes were cut due to length.
Because, at heart, the film is focused on the odd-couple pairing, with Venom and Eddie having grown quite, er, attached to one another over the past two films, even as they constantly bicker. It’s not up to the mutual mayhem and vulgar wisecracking levels of the last Deadpool movie—more like reluctantly conjoined twins, doing a sideshow act where they scare the bejesus out of, say, a drunken Vegas yuppie peeing in public and steal his clothes and shoes.
The Venom movies have made quite a pile of money out of what is seemingly a simple setup: Eddie and Brock go on adventures, meet really bad aliens, emerge with a stronger bond. It’s endearing how B-movie it all is. When they want to remind us exactly of the highlights from the past 100 minutes of the movie, Eddie has one of those dreamy flashback moments… where they roll a highlight reel of the past 100 minutes of the movie. It’s cheesy, yet funny.
And in a way, it’s refreshing to have a franchise based on Marvel Comics characters that actually finds an off-ramp, one that actually ends. Then again, if Marvel can bring back Wolverine from a pile of desecrated bones, there’s no putting it past them to resurrect Venom’s storyline elsewhere.
And while this may be the last dance for Hardy, it’s presumably not for Knull, who is teased into another franchise in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU) after the first credits roll. Oh boy.
