Review: “Venom: The Last Dance”

Three films ago, Tom Hardy crushed Jekyll and Hyde in a strange, slimy double act. In a Marvel universe full of alter egos hiding stealthy superpowers, your investigative reporter Eddie Brock doesn’t transform. He shares his body with a black alien symbiote (voiced with a baritone growl by Hardy), who sometimes swallows him whole, sometimes shoots out a tentacle or two, and always gleefully punctuates Eddie’s internal monologue.

These have been consistently confusing, almost intentionally bad films, but Hardy’s performance has been an oddly compelling one-man comedy. It’s one thing to put on a cape and jump into the sky. Another is running madly through the desert with an alien voice barking inside you, like Eddie’s inner alien does in the new “Venom: The Last Dance,” “Engage your core,” “Nice horsey” and “Tequila!”

The biggest dichotomy in these films, however, is not the division of the Eddie symbiote. It’s the contrast between Hardy’s funny, sometimes strangely moving performance and all the CGI mess around him. There were fun moments in the first two films, but if “The Last Dance,” now in theaters, is the swan song of this yet-to-be-formed franchise, it confirms that the “Venom” films never fared well. outside.

In “The Last Dance,” Kelly Marcel, co-writer of the first two “Venom” films, takes over as director, following Andy Serkis (2021’s “Venom: Let There Be Carnage”) and Ruben Fleischer (2018’s “Venom”). . We reunite with Venom (the fusion of Eddie and his soulmate, an alien entity) in Mexico, where they are on the run from the law. But a new threat is also emerging.

The film begins with Knull (Serkis), the symbiote’s creator, who, from some dark, distant corner of space, sends aliens to retrieve a “codex” found in Venom’s spine that, if obtained, will lead to the annihilation of humans and humans alike. symbionts.

For me, bringing a typical comic book apocalyptic plot is the last thing a “Venom” movie needs. The best sequences from the first two films are no more complicated than Venom craving lobster or ordering pizza. Smaller stakes are more suited to its twisted comedy. The touchstone for these films shouldn’t be the Marvel playbook, but old episodes of “The Odd Couple.”

Instead, we’re thrown into an immediately boring Area 51 setting, where an elaborate laboratory led by Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple) studies the symbiotes it has trapped with the help of a military division led by Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor, lending more seriousness to the film than it deserves). Once the alien bugs arrive in search of the codex, there’s a lot of running and fighting, with a UFO enthusiast family in a VW bus (Rhys Ifans plays the father) thrown into the mix. The ensuing battle ultimately, as the title promises, threatens to tear Venom apart forever.

But the promise of the “Venom” series, in fact, is that the main Marvel material would intrude less here. This is a B-movie realm of the multiverse with little appetite for solemnity, nobility, or two-and-a-half-hour runtimes. They can feel a bit like discarded imitations, which is both their appeal and their frustration.

I kept rooting for the surprisingly lifeless “The Last Dance” to pull back on its world-saving plot (and its CGI) and focus more on its most potent effect: Hardy’s split-personality double act. If this is a last hurrah — which, admittedly, is a dubious idea for anything even adjacently linked to “Spider-Man” — it’s a shame we never got to see more Venom in daily life. After all, Eddie is a journalist. One can only wonder how he and the symbiote could have debated more pressing issues than the fate of the universe, like the Oxford commas.

★★

VENOM: THE LAST DANCE

Directed and written by Kelly Marcel. Starring Tom Hardy, Juno Temple and Alanna Ubach. At AMC Boston Common, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, Landmark Kendall Square. 110 minutes. PG-13 (intense sequences of violence and action, bloody images and strong language)