Review Venom: The Last Dance is neither interesting nor a worthy conclusion to a weak saga

It is already a general trend that film studios have run out of ideas. Without presenting quality products, the box office has been important and decisive to continue with their productions and sagas.

The alien symbiote creature created by David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane made its solo debut on the big screen by director Ruben Fleischer in 2018, having very moderate success. We know that telling a story of this character without the appearance and presence of Spider-Man is very difficult, yet something salvageable was achieved.

The great actor and director Andy Serkis brought Venom: Let There Be Carnage to theaters in 2021, a film that promised to tell something spectacular with a new and highly anticipated Carnage character, thus ensuring that these 2 symbiote beings will face each other in an epic fight that although it was the one with the highest revenue that year, it was not what was expected nor was it enough.

In 2024, it is now director Kelly Marcel who will close this saga and this story, Venom: The Last Dance. This polarizing film has divided opinions and from which endless rumors have been created about what could follow after all this and although nothing is confirmed, the Venom saga now has its last chance.

What is Venom: The Last Dance about?

Eddie Brock and the Venom symbiote are now fugitives and are being pursued by 2 enemy threats, an invasion of Earth is imminent and the duo will be forced to make a devastating decision that can end with one of them or with all of humanity.

When the character of Venom made his debut on the big screen in the disastrous Spider-Man 3 by director Sam Raimi in 2007, we expected to see something similar to what happened with this duo in the comics, but that was not the case. The story was confusing and the overexposure of characters made it not work, it was a failure, and they postponed this encounter between hero and villain indefinitely.

In order to compete with Marvel Studios for the rights to the characters, Sony is taking a risk with Venom in a desperate attempt to make its universe that could be developed further in the future with other villains such as Vulture, Morbius, and soon Kraven: The Hunter and that in turn, they would have the opportunity to face the arachnid.

First, it was a question of character rights between both studios, now that they have reached an agreement and that it is Marvel Studios who will be in charge of producing the Spider-Man films, the idea of ​​a shared universe by Sony Pictures is already ruled out, there is no longer a link that ties all this together and with this third installment, they take a step towards the end of everything.

Venom: The Last Dance is far from being a worthy conclusion to a weak franchise and makes the serious mistake of making it freer, with more senseless jokes and musicals, of everything that had worked in the two previous films and even more so in Venom: Let There Be Carnage it completely deviates from its original idea and objective to be a film in favor of absurd and senseless elements carried out in an underground and secret laboratory of the famous Area 51, again wasting the opportunity to make this something more memorable.

The script written by Kelly Marcel based on the story of Tom Hardy has too many cuts that do not help the development of a linear story, the subplots interrupt the entire development of what it wanted to tell, being able to see this version of Venom for one last time does not produce the expected emotion being that it is one of the most iconic villains of the 90s with all the potential and spectacularity that we expected, as a result, we have that its poor execution does not take the time to explain or have a more concrete development of its characters, mainly the villain Knull (Andy Serkis).

The fact that nothing here is explained and everything happens so fast that we do not have time as spectators to see the action in its entirety makes all this absurd, boring, uninteresting, and at times extremely stupid, the subplots do not go anywhere, they are only there because they have to fill a time and space that could have been used to have a more coherent and symmetrical narrative.

This all has a dark start with dark, perverse overtones, a very serious presentation of Knull, the Marvel villain who created the symbiotes and about whom almost nothing is explained, an advantage if you already have the comic’s baggage, Knull explains in a sinister and threatening way that he needs henchmen to search for the codec that will free him from his confinement in the void, this codec exists when Eddie and the symbiote merge creating Venom which allows Knull’s creatures to locate them and hunt them down.

This fugitive duo flees in every imaginable area, there is a moment when Eddie loses his shoes and a joke is made out of this that is not so funny as the joke on the plane about the Mission: Impossible movies with Tom Cruise, however, there are points in favor, if we leave the dialogues and the narrative on one side we are left with the special effects, the excessive use of CGI on this occasion applies very well in terms of environments and textures of the symbiotes that together with their color palette reinvent what we already know and do not modernize it, they adapt it to this version.

The ending gives us the feeling that the editing and the cut that we see in the cinema has too many holes that cannot be connected without having that previous that explains and defines what we are seeing, sequences that although they have a lot of very good action are diluted too soon and leave us halfway through what could have been spectacular and what the film itself demanded of itself, we see an Eddie who after a battle wakes up in the hospital where a military officer informs him that his heroic actions with Venom in Area 51 earned him a pardon with the condition of keeping the events that occurred secret, upon arriving in New York Eddie contemplates the Statue of Liberty while remembering Venom and the sacrifice he made for him and all humanity.

The simplest and typically trite way to end something is the simplicity of killing the main or secondary character, in some cases, this works to make way for something bigger, in this case, this does not happen, falling into the emotional with a moral speech in which friendship and companionship even between different species is the most important, something that betrays everything that its creators thought of this villain, it must be a villain who does villain things not something friendly and redeemable, the only justification it has is that this is a different version and from another universe.

Another point against is the misuse of the songs, completely unnecessary that there are musical sequences that pretend to be like mini videos with a structure very much like MTV in the 90s, on the other hand, Area 51 is used where Temple’s scientists and Ejiofor’s military leader have contradictory ideas about how to communicate and deal with the symbiotes in particular with Venom on the one hand she wants to study them and on the other he wants to destroy them.

The idea of ​​introducing more symbiotes like one that is made of stone, another of fire, one that seems to be an Anti-Venom, She-Venom, a red symbiote, and another blue that makes a reference to Spider-Man and what could have been a spectacular sequence comes to nothing when Toxine is devoured without having had the slightest development, here it is betrayed by saying that these beings can fuse with other humans when in the first film it was only with certain hosts, a rule that does not matter here.

And that’s all there is to these characters, there are no sequences in which we see them all together like in the Lethal Protector miniseries, something that could have been explored from the first film and finished in this one, the problem is that the studios leave everything for the end even though they don’t know how to solve it, instead, we see that the symbiote can control other creatures like a horse, a fish, a frog and at the end in the second post-credits scene a cockroach.

In the first post-credits scene we see Knull who is still imprisoned in the void with the promise of returning and finishing everything, in the second scene we see that on a stone there is a cockroach with the symbiote, which gives us to understand that this ended in this universe but that it can continue in other Marvel Studios projects.

The cast is made up of Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Stephen Graham, Peggy Lu, Clark Backo, Alanna Ubach, and Andy Serkis who do what they can with the rubbish script they have.

The music composed by Dan Deacon continues with the line of sounds that we already heard from Ludwig Göransson in the first part and with Marco Beltrami for the second, clean and exciting cuts that are diluted with the excessive cuts, the song Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen, Space Oddity by David Bowie, Wild World by Cat Stevens, Dancing Queen by A* Teans, Memories by Maroon 5, One Last Dance by Tom Morello & grandson and I Had Some Help by Post Malone & Morgan Wallen are poorly placed in the film, they do not become background elements but have their own and useless time on screen.

In conclusion, Venom: The Last Dance is a film that does not meet its audience’s expectations but rather the inconsistent studio that seeks only to make numbers at the box office and “try” to take advantage of what it has, a confusing action and a camera handling that pretends to be dizzying, a film more than the same and filler that contributes absolutely nothing to the Sony Pictures Universe and much less to the already established MCU, a more than regrettable ending that does not leave us satisfied.

Venom: The Last Dance is now in theaters in our country.