“The Last Dance” is bad on purpose

Venom: The Last Dance begins like so many promising films: the villain explains what his business is in an opening monologue, and was apparently included because either test audiences or studio executives found him too confusing. The thing is, it's no less confusing for being laid out in shallow words over a montage of Frank Frazetta-esque images of a wild fantasy wilderness. The villain Knull (Andy Serkis) is a god-like figure who apparently existed before the universe; He created the alien symbiote race that Venom belongs to, and was then betrayed and imprisoned by them. In the film, he manifests himself as a mass of dirty blonde hair huddled in the middle of a swamp. As Venom: The Last Dance As the film progresses and it becomes clear that Knull is just going to stay in this swamp and send out portal-hopping spider-lizard-monster-things to obey his orders, you might get the sinking feeling that accompanies so many late-period superhero films You realize that half of the shit that happens on screen is for a future episode that may or may not ever come out. Venom: The Last Dance is supposed to be the end of a trilogy – that's right in the title – and yet a great evil seems to hover in the future out of habit, as if the need to never solve things was a feature and not a flaw of these films, a promise Next time it will actually be good.

Have any des PoisonWas it good? The first was essentially a Madame Web–A quality enterprise held together by Tom Hardy's decision to portray his character's transformation from investigative journalist to flesh-eating vigilante as a one-man buddy comedy. The subsequent sequels have had the misfortune of getting caught up in this joke, leaning into it with increasingly silly bits, like Venom cooking breakfast (which happens in). Venom: Let There Be Carnage) and Venom dances to ABBA (like he did in Venom: The Last Dancein which the screenwriter Kelly Marcel takes over the direction). Hardy remains compelling throughout, spending most of this new film hungover in cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, being dragged from place to place while looking like he's about to run away – a comic book hero who never looks cool . But Hardy is one of the great leading madmen of our time, and the fact that he has now spent years making these half-hearted affairs even remotely visible doesn't actually seem like much of an achievement. Three features is a lot to hold on to as Hardy performs a digitally enhanced version of a hand puppet act. At a certain point, you have to wonder if it wouldn't be better for him and everyone else involved to make a film that's daring to begin with, rather than praising his ability to inject a subversively strange performance into a franchise product.

Venom: The Last Dance is primarily a road trip film that begins with Hardy's Eddie Brock on the run in Mexico. He tries to travel to New York and instead ends up in the Nevada desert, where scientist Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple) and General Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) lead Imperium, an underground program to research symbiotes alongside the Bald Empire. It's less a journey than a convergence of the plot. While Strickland and his special forces have pursued Eddie in his efforts to collect symbiotes, Eddie and Venom have also attracted the attention of one of Knull's henchmen for reasons that even the characters in the film struggle to explain. Essentially, the Eddie-Venom combination is the key to Knull's freedom, although the henchmen, called Xenophages, can only attack the duo when in full black, toothy form. That's unfortunate, because it's the only way Venom really looks good, although overall the effects in this part are a little less jarring than in the previous two. Instead, we see a lot of Venom as a floating head coming out of Eddie's back, as well as horse poison, fish poison, and frog poison as the two try to avoid capture by the Empire and the Xenophages, who can jump by the thousands of feet, can't with conventional ones They are killed by means and have a mouth that serves as a wood chipper for meat.

The solution to the problem is that Eddie and/or Venom must die, a problem that the entire film tries to pretend isn't obvious in order to avoid digressions about the death of Dr. Payne's brother trapped in a lightning accident or across a road – a hippie family led by an alien-possessed Rhys Ifans, or a scene early on where the film recreates the post-credits scene Spider-Man: No Way Home while Venom cries about how he's “so done with this multiverse shit.” The lack of coherent statements is less important than the general feeling that the film is intentionally bad, aside from being bad by accident, which is the only way to explain why there's a shadowy figure in a control booth, whose identity is never revealed and their presence is never explained. It makes weak gestures that suggest it's supposed to be about regret and mortality, and then includes a montage cut to “Maroon 5” as a damning accusation that there was ever any intention of getting honest. Venom: The Last Dance is not a joke, but a grin to let you know that even though everyone knows what this is about, you are the idiot who bought the ticket.