The Sony branch of the Marvel multiverse has been a punchline as much as it’s been a line of movies, but the bright spot has always been Venom, which goes out on his brightest note with “Venom: The Last Dance” (2024). After a cameo in 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” Eddie Brock/Venom (Tom Hardy) returns to the Sonyverse to open this trilogy capper and announces: “We’re home! I’m so done with the multiverse sh**.”
That would’ve been laughable a few years back, but “The Last Dance” is a candidate for the best superhero film of 2024. Granted, another candidate is the MCU’s “Deadpool & Wolverine,” but those characters were bought from Fox.
Which isn’t to say “The Last Dance” reinvents or reinvigorates the genre; it’s just that trilogy writer Kelly Marcel – directing for the first time – knows how to make a high-class B-monster movie. Hardy, who helped develop the story, has masterfully developed the friendship between human Eddie and alien lifeform Venom (a gooey, toothy head that sometimes protrudes from Eddie’s body and is voiced by Hardy).
“Venom: The Last Dance” (2024)
Director: Kelly Marcel
Writers: Kelly Marcel (screenplay, story), Tom Hardy (story)
Stars: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple
They’ve been symbiotic since the first film, a span of one year in the story’s time, and they’ve figured out the rhythms of sharing the body, necessary for both of them to live. If you desire, insert your metaphor about roommates or invisible friends or a lonely person’s mental-health issues. But when watching the film, it’s basically a heartfelt, smile-worthy odd-couple friendship.
After 2018’s “Venom” and 2021’s “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” Hardy and company have largely dispensed with the physical comedy – aside from a gag where Venom (dozens of appendages shooting from Eddie’s body) mixes drinks to the annoyance of both the bartender and the hungover Eddie. They get along now, and aim to get out of San Francisco – where they are wanted by authorities after the events of “Let There Be Carnage” (which I forgot the details of, but it doesn’t matter) – and go cross-country to see the Statue of Liberty.
Road trip!
They’re in need of a road trip, and so is the saga, which finds new avenues for humor when Eddie hitches a ride from the Bay Area to Vegas with a lovable family of four led by Rhys Ifans’ Martin, a not-quite-as-hippie answer to the principal from “Freaks and Geeks.” Along the way, they aim to catch a glimpse of aliens at Area 51 before it shuts down.
Conveniently, in that charming way of monster movies, scientists are secretly probing the symbiote material at that very location. I don’t mean to say “The Last Dance” is all a silly romp, though; the motivations and emotions are genuine. Juno Temple’s Dr. Paine had gotten into extraterrestrial studies to honor her twin brother, seen in a flashback.
Chiwetel Ejiofor brings menace to counter the exciting discoveries; he plays Strickland, the military leader watching over the science camp. And more villainy comes from an entity called Knull (Andy Serkis). He’s the inner psychology of all the evil four-legged symbiotes (xenophages) who aim to capture Eddie/Venom because they are the maguffin (“the codex”). “The Last Dance” has an appealingly dark undertone, yet remains cozy thanks to the central friendship and the old-fashioned frontier spirit of discovery from Martin’s family and Dr. Paine.
The plot is no more complex than it needs to be. Marcel hangs a series of good set pieces on it while Hardy nails every little gag, bedraggled from constantly losing his footwear. Eddie is “I’m having a bad day” personalized to the hilt; his sheer likeability would drive the movie, but we get even more likability from Venom, who has been humanized. This cycles back to additional humor, in that this visually hideous creature (even Stitch has nothing on him) is actually very sweet.
Maybe it’s the rolling, gooey ball of goodwill, but I even find the special effects enjoyable, whereas they were indecipherable silly string blobs at times in the first two movies. “Venom: The Last Dance” makes it look easy, but as we see from the struggling superhero movies around it in the 2020s, it’s apparently not.