Movie Review: Venom - The Last Dance

Venom: The Last Dance (2024)

And so, it ends. I've always admitted that despite its quality, I've liked the two previous Venom movies. They aren't the best, most serious adaptations of everyone's favourite symbiote anti-hero ever, but they do a rather great job at being action movies. Slightly more crude, slightly more violent, and relying a lot on Tom Hardy's dual performance as both an exasperated Eddie Brock and what some people have been calling 'frat-bro' Venom... but they have been entertaining stuff and, for the most part, the only parts of the so-called 'Sony Spider-Man Extended Universe' that actually worked. Venom has enough star power among comic-book fans and the concept is novel enough that, just like comic-book Venom, the character and his own mythology was enough to pull on a couple of movies on his own. But it's still apparently not enough, because after two movies, they finally decided to pull the plug with a third one to complete the trilogy. 

And it feels... weird. All of the promotional material, and the cold open, focuses on this big bad evil symbiote god Knull. Who... devoid of the comic book context, is pretty impressive even if he does look like a villain from a World of Warcraft cutscene. Now I'm not expecting him to be a major, fully fleshed-out villain -- none of these superhero villains tend to be -- but I expected him to at least be relevant to the story of the movie if they're going to go through the trouble to introduce him. 

No, we don't get that. 

I also didn't expect much of the frankly rather minimal-effort tie-in to Spider-Man: No Way Home, where Eddie got transported to Earth-616 by Dr. Strange's spell. It is quite bizarre to see that we tie in so much of this otherwise irrelevant post-credits scene from another movie, with an extended scene of Venom and Eddie being drunk and the bartender being arrested later on. Considering this has nothing to do with the upcoming Xenophgae plot, or the sinister government agent plot, it really feels like it's a completely unneeded tie-in. 

We then set up aspects of the story that ties in to the previous two Venom movies. Turns out that Detective Patrick Mulligan is assumed dead after the events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and Eddie Brock is the primary suspect. This leads Eddie and Venom to be on the run, trying to get to New York City in an attempt to clear Eddie's name. It's a simple enough premise. I also really enjoy the scene where he fights a bunch of animal traffickers as a nice re-introduction to the audience about these two's dynamics. 

A new anti-Symbiote organization, Imperium, begins to hunt down Eddie Brock and Venom. Led by a staunch soldier Rex Strickland, they work on the soon-to-be-decommissioned Area 51 with a bunch of scientists. We've got the 'science over everything' Dr. Teddy Paine, and her assistant Sadie Christmas. They've caught the shell-shocked and near-vegetable Patrick Mulligan. They've also got around a half-dozen of other captured Symbiotes, which feels to be in stark contrast to how the other Symbiotes appeared to have been wiped out in Venom, but whatever. A green symbiotes bonds with Mulligan, and 'Toxin' (not actually named in the movie) gives the three named Imperium government agents a bit of a warning about the incoming darkness and some stuff about the Codex.

Both Strickland and Paine get... some character development over the course of the movie. They're acted competently, and get enough screentime to be memorable. Strickland goes from just a random soldier to being vengeful after his team gets killed partway through the movie, to finally realizing that Venom is the 'good' alien. Paine is dispassionate and doesn't care about anything but the science, until I guess she grows a bit of a heart in the climax. 

Eddie and Venom suffer this consequence first-hand as they try to latch onto the side of an airplane as Venom. The Xenophage tracks them, leaps up and we get a pretty cool battle on top of the airplane before they all crash-land onto the Nevada Desert. The movie cuts back and forth a bit about exposition -- some is delivered to us by Venom, and some by 'Toxin' later on.

But basically, the God of the Symbiotes, Knull, is awakening and he's sent one of his minions, a hideous organic beast with a whirling tooth-maw called the Xenophage, to Earth. The Xenophage can detect Eddie and Venom when they fully transform into their Venom form, and is hunting them for a 'Codex' that is embedded within their DNA. This 'Codex' is something that is forged when a Symbiote fully bonds with their host and resurrects them from the dead, which is a nice little change from how it was in the comics and helps to streamline matters to make Venom and Eddie a bit more special. 

After some nice visuals like Venom taking over a horse, we get more action scenes. We get a three-way fight between Strickland's soldiers, Eddie/Venom and the Xenophage as they encounter each other. This leads to the deaths of many of Strickland's soldiers, and in perhaps the only nice thing I can say about the Xenophage's usage in this movie, we get to see just how horrifyingly unkillable the constantly-regenerating Xenophage is. 

Barely surviving the river fight and nearly being separated from Venom (which is a nice, tense scene), Eddie hitchhikes and meets a family of crazy UFO enthusiasts, the Moons, who... I get why they are included in the movie. It gives Eddie and Venom some 'humans' to bond with. But they are such a distraction in an already cluttered movie that doesn't deliver in a lot of what it wants to do, so giving us a family of kooky hippies does nothing but grind the movie to a halt. There is no reason why we couldn't have brought in some of the cast from the first two movies (or even used Patrick Mulligan and/or Mrs. Chen, who actually show up in this movie!) and use them as the nice humans that Venom needs to save.

Eddie and Venom arrive into Las Vegas and get up to some of their usual hijinks, which is actually fun. They meet Mrs. Chen, the lady from the store, rather randomly. We get another joke that overstays its welcome, which is Venom and Mrs. Chen dancing on the penthouse. This leads to a fight against the Xenophage, who comes in and breaks the penthouse. By un-transforming, they distract the Xenophage and cause it to bugger off, but Strickland's men comes in and arrest Eddie and Venom, separating the two. It's a nice sequence as Eddie actually begins to panic after being separated, after the two spent so much time bickering in the Nevada and Las Vegas scenes. 

Eddie and Mulligan/Toxin have a bit of a chat, which is basically the last time that Mulligan is even relevant or coherent in the movie. We get a massive confrontation as a vengeance-happy Strickland wants to execute Eddie Brock to prevent the Codex from ever being utilized ever again... which is actually a rather smart thing to do other than the fact that we like Eddie. Sadie Christmas frees the sample of Venom taken from the bar and uses it to bond to Eddie and save him from Strickland's trigger-happy shots.

Of course, this attracts the Xenophage, who attacks the Area 51 facility. Toxin dies an inglorious and anticlimactic death, but not before telling Venom that the other Symbiotes are opposed to Knull and they will help him fight back. We get a very cool sequence as the other Symbiotes in the facility are released. they begin to bond with random staff and start unleashing all sorts of powers against the Xenophage. Some have fire powers, some have whips and giant fists and whatnot... it's a nice visual scene if nothing else, and Sadie bonds with her comic-book counterpart's Symbiote, Lasher.

Elsewhere in the planet Kylntar, Knull sends even more Xenophages to Earth via portals. A single indestructible, constantly-regenerating Xenophage is horrifying enough for the combined Symbiote and soldier army to fight back, but several ends up overwhelming everyone. Oh, and the Moons are there too, with the movie following their completely uninteresting storyline of them sneaking into Area 51 and finally discovering that holy shit aliens are real. Their main contribution is just to be there for Venom to have someone to save.

Anyway, after a bunch of fight sequences, most of the other symbiotes are killed (including Lasher). Venom decides that he needs to sacrifice himself to destroy the Codex, since he's not willing to sacrifice Eddie. Venom turns himself into a giant net, and after a goodbye with Eddie, leads the Symbiotes towards a giant acid tank. Together with a mortally-wounded Strickland, Venom forces the Xenophages as they are burnt and melted to death by the acid, but dies in the process. The goodbye between Venom and Eddie is... all right. I wouldn't say that it's super-duper emotional, but it's not terrible. 

The only surviving Symbiote after this climax is Dr. Payne, who bonds with the Agony symbiote to flash-step and save Sadie from the explosion. Which feels honestly quite randomly inserted into the climax that's pretty focused on Venom and Eddie's separation, as well as Venom and Strickland's sacrifice. 

The rest of the movie rapid-fires through a conclusion. Eddie wakes up in a hospital, where some government agent tells him to keep the events a secret in exchange of having his criminal record expunged. We get a quiet scene as Eddie finally arrives in their goal, New York City... but without Venom. A mid-credits scene show Knull being all ominous; and a post-credits scene show Venom having survived, bonded to a cockroach in Area 51. 

It's... it's a messy movie. Two major things, I think, really hurt the movie -- the first being the inclusion of so many new characters at the expense of existing ones. The Moons really add nothing to the story and only really bring it down... I feel like changing whatever role they had and substituting Mrs. Chen in (even if they can't get Anne or Dan's actors back) would've done so much better in actually making them feel relevant. Patrick Mulligan is also reduced to nothing but a rambling plot device, which honestly feels like a waste of the audience's investment and time. The second factor? The antagonists aren't interesting at all. Strickland is all right for what he is, but the big symbiote threat isn't actually a character, but a glorified attack dog. The Xenophages were pretty effective as a monstrous threat, but for all the attention that the exposition has towards how they are heralds of Knull and how he is the big deal, it feels like such a huge missed opportunity to not have Knull show up. There are ways to have him show up and fight Venom here in his last big cinematic hurrah without killing Knull off at the end of the movie. 

What we got, instead, is that Venom fights a glorified personality-less attack drone with a bunch of allies who are also personality-less .This would've been a bad thing to do even if it was 'just' a middle movie, but as the climax and conclusion of the Venom saga?

Yeah. Maybe the film designers were holding on with the hope that they are able to renegotiate a contract with Tom Hardy to keep doing Venom movies. Maybe they wanted Teddy Paine/Agony to herald a brand-new Symbiote-led franchise fighting against Knull. Whatever the case, it's moot since the Sony Spider-Man universe ends up being canned entirely. I felt like it's such a shame since the Venom movies are some of the more solid efforts from that shared universe, and to have it end not with a bang, but with a whimper... it's kind of a shame. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Eddie and Venom got transported to the MCU universe at the end of Venom: Let There Be Carnage and we see him getting drunk in Spider-Man: No Way Home. 
• The storyline of minions of Knull hunting for a 'Codex' to herald the God of Symbiotes' return is a rough adaptation of the Absolute Carnage storyline, which in turn led to the King in Black storyline featuring Knull arriving on Earth. Only in that storyline, it was Carnage hunting all previous symbiote hosts instead of just Eddie Brock. 
  
• Named characters:
• Patrick Mulligan turning into a symbiote is a reference to how his comic-book counterpart became Toxin, though the appearance and personality of Toxin deviates a lot from comic page to movie.
• Dr. Payne is a composite and gender-flipped version of Dr. Thaddeus Payne, a.k.a. 'Dr. Pain', a minor Venom villain. She also bonds with the Agony symbiote, although the movie gives Agony electrical and super-speed powers instead of corrosive spit. 
• Sadie Christmas borrows her name from a minor host of Lasher, one of the five Life Foundation Symbiotes, and indeed bonds with a Symbiote that resembles Lasher in the movie's climax. 
• Rex Strickland was a 'Sym-Soldier' in the Vietnam War in the comics who encountered a different batch of symbiotes connected to Knull in the comics.
• Knull, the King in Black, is the Symbiote God imprisoned in the heart of the Symbiote homeworld Kylntar. In the comics, Carnage's efforts would eventually free him and he would lead his Symbiote army in war against the galaxy. 
• The Xenophages are a race of giant bug-looking monsters that feed on Symbiotes naturally. They are unaffiliated with Knull in the comics, and the movie has given them the role of various Knull-minions like Carnage and Grendel. 
• A soldier called Thompson has his legs chewed off by the Xenophage. This is most likely a reference to Spider-Man's bully Flash Thompson, who lost his legs in the Iraq War and would later be better known as Agent Venom.
• In addition, some of the other unnamed symbiotes are based on characters from the comics:
• An orange symbiote with giant fists is the movie's version of Phage, albeit with comic!Riot's signature shapeshifting ability -- movie!Riot was given Phage's blades instead of his comic counterpart's club-fists.
• One of the whirling Symbiotes seem to have the red-and-yellow colours of Scream, but none of the bonded Symbiotes have that colouration. 
• Three unnamed Symbiotes that do not correspond to characters in the comics appear in the final battle -- a two-headed Symbiote (possibly inspired by Hybrid, but that's reaching), a white-and-black Symbiote, and a bizarre fire-shooting Symbiote. 
• This isn't the first time that a symbiote has bonded to an animal -- Venom famously bonded to a Tyrannosaurus rex in the Old Man Logan comics and Carnage survived his death at the end of Absolute Carnage by bonding to a fish. The Mania symbiote also survived by bonding to a cockroach.