The Shallow End: VENOM: THE LAST DANCE

There’s a finale feeling throughout Venom: The Last Dance, a movie that plays like an ending in every way. It’s the supposedly final entry in this particular strand of Sony’s barely-connected Spider-Man spin-offs, though its end credits tease a few potential ways forward, and there’s the looming threat of more Morbius and Madame Web out there somewhere. (At least their movies are hacked-up oddities; maybe Kraven will be, too.) Some of these are fun enough, but here there’s something exhausted about this whole endeavor. It’s tied to the increasingly strained efforts to keep the larger superhero boom from going bust. And it’s the slapdash smallness of these Sony concepts, which are especially thin and stretched to the breaking point here. It’s not for the lack of trying on the part of star and co-writer Tom Hardy, who clearly loves pulling double duty playing the awkward muckraker Eddie Brock in all his shuffling, stumbling tics, while also voicing his extraterrestrial parasite, Venom, in a semi-comprehensible gargle. The title character slithers out of Brock in gooey tendrils sometimes ending in a semi-viscous countenance, and then goops over his entire body to become the anti-hero who’ll wrestle with other alien villains. In this one it’s a pack of enormous creatures—some bizarre, toothy hybrid of wolves and squids—sent to Earth to sniff out Venom at the behest of a Bad Guy who spends the entire movie glowering motionless on an evil throne. So Eddie and Venom are on the run from them, and also the government, after being framed for the events of the previous picture, and scientists, who want to experiment on them. It all comes together in a few sequences of boring, dark, half-comprehensible CG chaos.

What it doesn’t leave time for is any believable escalation or cause and effect. Instead we have scenes happening for the sake of happening, characters appearing for the sake of appearing, and decisions made just to prolong the plot and facilitate the fighting. It’s constantly asserting ideas about the relationship between Eddie and Venom that aren’t quite embodied in the storytelling. The first in the series was dumb cliched fun; the second was quick, silly and hollow. Neither laid the groundwork necessary for the tearful goodbyes teed up in the final stretch of this one. (How strange to find this is the second dreary Marvel movie of the year with a self-consciously corny sentimental clip-show montage in the end.) But nor does this movie ever really activate its potential, like those earlier entries could. Instead it’s undercutting every action with off-tempo reaction and even its oddball attempts at humor strand characters in disconnected bits of business. Helmed by Kelly Marcel, the series’ screenwriter making her directorial debut, it finds little visual excitement or narrative momentum or character detail. It’s even shed most of its predecessor’s supporting cast, and barely characterizes its new members, leaving Hardy more or less alone in a routine superhero climax that makes the earlier Venoms look like real movies. It’s all so blasé and tired, it almost feels like the dreary ending for an entire genre. As I endured its endless, unsatisfying sequences of glop, I was filled with the same hollowness that accompanied Joker 2 and The Marvels and Aquaman 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine and so on. To paraphrase Keats, I feel we’re watching the last oozings hours by hours.