Director/Screenplay – Kelly Marcel, Story – Tom Hardy & Kelly Marcel, Producers – Avi Arad, Tom Hardy, Kelly Marcel, Amy Pascal, Hutch Parker & Matt Tolmach, Photography – Fabian Wagner, Music – Dan Beacon, Visual Effects Supervisors – Aharon Bourland & John Moffatt, Visual Effects – Digital Domain (Supervisor – Scott Mmkrj Edelstein), DNeg (Supervisor – David Lee), Industrial Light and Magic (Supervisor – Simone Coco & Ben Snow), Instinctual (Supervisor – Alan Lattieri), Rodeo FX (Supervisor – Sebastien Francoeur) & Territory Studio (Supervisor – Ryan Hays), Special Effects Supervisor – Christopher James Corbould, Production Design – Chris Lowe. Production Company – Avi Arad/Matt Tolmach/Pascal Pictures/Tom Hardy.
Cast
Tom Hardy (Eddie Brock/Venom), Chiwetel Ejiofor (General Rex Strickland), Juno Temple (Dr Teddy Paine), Rhys Ifans (Martin Moon), Stephen Graham (Detective Patrick Mulligan), Peggy Lu (Mrs Chen), Clark Backo (Sadie), Alanna Ubach (Nova Moon), Christo Fernandez (Barman), Hala Finley (Echo Moon), Dash McCloud (Leaf Moon), Andy Serkis (Knull), Jared Abrahamson (Captain Forrest)
Plot
Eddie Brock and Venom make a return to their home world of the multiverse. Finding that he is accused of a murder, Eddie sets out to New York to clear his name. While riding on the side of a plane, they are attacked by an alien creature. Venom reveals that this is a Xenophage that has come to Earth seeking the codex that exists between Eddie and Venom. Eddie travels to Las Vegas only to be captured by General Strickland who supervises operations at the soon-to-be decommissioned Area 51. Strickland’s people forcibly separate Venom from Eddie but this attracts a host of Xenophages that arrive on Earth seeking the codex.
Venom: The Last Dance is the third in a series of films spun off from the character that originally appeared as a Spider-Man villain. Amid the popularity of Marvel Comics films on the screen in the 2000s/10s/20s, the right to Spider-Man have been held by Sony Pictures who first placed Venom in Spider-Man 3 (2007). In an attempt to compete with the MCU, Sony sought to create their own multiverse by spinning various films off from supporting Spider-Man characters and villains with the likes of Morbius (2022), Kraven the Hunter (2024) and Madame Web (2024). The most popular of these was the Tom Hardy-starring series that began with Venom (2018) was followed by Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021).
With Venom: The Last Dance, the director’s chair is inhabited by Kelly Marcel, who had performed scripting duties for the other two Venom films. She is the daughter of Terry Marcel, the British director of the fantasy film Hawk the Slayer (1980). She apparently became good friends with Tom Hardy in London when both were struggling to make breaks in the industry. Marcel was previously creator/producer on the prehistoric SF tv series Terra Nova (2011) and wrote the acclaimed script for Saving Mr. Banks (2013) and the adaptation of Fifty Shades of Gray (2015). Marcel makes her directorial debut here.
I found Venom: The Last Dance at least to be a less worse film than Let There Be Carnage was. On the other hand, you get the impression that the Venom series was one that stopped making any effort to take what was going on seriously a long time ago. It is not quite in the arena of say the Sharknado sequels refusal to take anything that happens seriously, but by about the point that we get scenes of Tom Hardy racing through the desert on a Venom-possessed horse, it is getting close. Any pretension to the seriousness of the endeavour topple over into the completely ridiculous by about the point that Kelly Marcel has Venom and Mrs Chen (Peggy Lu) – who is there for no other reason than that she was in the other films – conducing a dance around a Las Vegas hotel suite together to a remix of Abba’s Dancing Queen (1978).
Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom
Venom started out in the comic-books as a villain. By the point of this, the third of the Venom films, Tom Hardy and the symbiote resemble something akin to a comedy duo. The point where Venom shows a preference for show tunes and goes disco dancing with Peggy Lu feels a long, long way from any threat the comic-book character ever had. And by the ending where the assorted symbiotes take over fairly much every non-villainous supporting character to repel the Xenophage invasion and the mawkish scene where Venom appears to the kid (Dash McCloud) to tell him “Don’t be scared” and thank him for the chocolate, Venom is well and truly crossed over to the side of cartoonish do-gooders.
It is by this point you wonder if Kelly Marcel, Tom Hardy et al are actively trying to compete for the Worst Film of the Year category. Several years earlier in films like Bronson (2008), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Legend (2015) and tv’s Taboo (2017), Tom Hardy was seeming like one of the top actors to emerge from his generation. Why he has chosen to spend six years frittering it away in such a bad series of films – even going so far as to take a producing and co-story credit here – is going to be one of the great mysteries.
Perhaps one of the biggest annoyances about Venom: The Last Dance is how it completely abandons the cliffhanger left at the end of Let There Be Carnage, which left us with the possibility that Venom and potentially all the other Sony Spider-Man spinoff characters might end up together in a multiverse crossover. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) even teased this with a cameo appearance from Tom Hardy. For whatever reason, this idea has just been abandoned and with a flick of the plotting pen, Eddie ends up returning home. I can’t recall ever having come across another sequel that so blatantly dismissed the previous film’s cliffhanger as this. At least the end that this film reaches seems to fairly conclusively kill the main character off – not that that has done anything to deter a sequel before.
