Title – Venom: The Last Dance (2024)

Director – Kelly Marcel (feature debut) 

Cast – Tom Hardy, Juno Temple, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rhys Ifans, Stephen Graham

Plot – On the run Eddie Brock/Venom (Hardy) battles missing footwear and an entirely new threat that is coming for him and his best friend and entire world if they don’t do something to stop it. 

“There’s an army coming that cannot be beaten”

Review by Eddie on 30/10/2024

Looking back to 2018 there was a lot of hope and excitement around Tom Hardy leading a long-overdue standalone Venom movie, so much so that the original film generated $856 million in global ticket sales and some mid-level joy from critics and audiences that were hopeful the decently OK first attempt was a stepping stone to something far greater as the series moved ahead. 

Here six years later at the end game that is The Last Dance, arriving after the rather misguided Let There Be Carnage in 2021, it’s clear to all now that the Hardy Venom era was one that was never able to properly grasp what it wanted to be or maximise the talents it had its disposal along the journey. 

Consistently lead by its unhinged and all-in leading man, it’s incredible to think that the like of Woody Harrelson, Stephen Graham, Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed have all at some stage jumped on board this particular iteration of the Venom universe and have all been unable to help the series overcome its many shortcomings that are once more here patched over to a degree by the fun that can be found in passing by Hardy going toe to toe against himself in amongst a terrible plot that feels aimless and unplanned for the most part. 

Following on directly from the events of the prior film, Dance is in simplistic turns a road-trip movie of Hardy’s Eddie Brock/Venom attempting to cross the country with a New York destination in mind only too be hamstrung by a lack of footwear, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s quick-moving and stunningly prepared government goon Strickland, Rhys Ifans ukulele playing alien loving hippy Martin and some of Venom’s old friends from the universe far beyond our reach. 

Along this journey you may wonder why there’s scenes involving Venom dancing with an old acquittance in Vegas, why Juno Temple’s Dr. Teddy Paine is in the movie at all or why Stephen Graham was asked to return as Detective Mulligan only to be stuck behind a glass window for his entire screentime and they’re questions you aren’t going to get any answers for in a feature that was clearly one dictated by suits in a boardroom rather than the creatives on ground-level. 

The whole thing feels relatively unloved and unrefined and for anyone that found little to no joy in the previous two Venom outings, the only thing they could do is avoid this newest outing like they would the plague but for those that got some level of entertainment from Hardy’s first two forays into the symbiote world and for those accepting that Dance is very much more of the same, there’s going to be the same level of satisfaction found as before, even if the glimmers of a greater promise the first film showed are well and truly snuffed out very early on here.

It’s a shame Hardy was never given a greater chance to succeed with his work in this space, here even getting a credit as one of the co-writers of the production that is overseen by first time director Kelly Marcel as one suspects that had the series managed to reach his same levels of zany and wild commitment we might have been looking at one of the more fun and accessible Marvel cinematic properties to come out in the post-Avengers era.  

Final Say – 

Providing very much of the same that has come before with an even less competent plot and sense of overall direction, Venom: The Last Dance wasn’t able to overcome the shortcomings present throughout the series and finds itself saved in the most part by an unashamedly loose-cannon turn from its leading man who is hellbent on taking charge around all the incompetence around him. 

2 1/2 pairs of Crocs out of 5