Venom: The Last Dance

A Symphony of Slime and Sentiment

Part of me still can't believe this franchise exists in exactly this form. Superhero cinema spent years trying to convince us it was mythic art, all multiverses and trauma speeches and lore spreadsheets. Then *Venom: The Last Dance* walks in, looks around at the rubble, and decides what people really need is a goo monster doing choreography to ABBA's "Dancing Queen." It is absurd. It is also, against my better judgment, kind of a blast.

Kelly Marcel, directing for the first time after writing the first two films, understands the one thing these movies absolutely need to protect: Eddie Brock and Venom are a romantic comedy couple trapped inside a superhero sequel. Nobody is here for stately mythology. We are here for the bickering, the co-dependence, and the sight of one miserable man sharing organs with a needy, chocolate-loving alien parasite. Marcel leans into that with refreshing sincerity. There is a road trip involving a UFO-believing hippie family led by Rhys Ifans. There is a David Bowie "Space Oddity" sing-along. Every so often the film remembers it is supposed to be about an alien invasion, but its real interest lies in whether Eddie and Venom can make it through another day without emotionally devouring each other.



Tom Hardy keeps the whole deranged machine alive. His Eddie is pure bodily exhaustion: sweating, twitching, jerking at the joints like his skeleton is having second thoughts. Watch the way he enters a room. The shoulders sag first, then the eyes flick around, already dreading the next public humiliation his own body is about to stage. It is basically silent-era physical comedy in the middle of a sci-fi chase movie. The straight-faced seriousness of Chiwetel Ejiofor and Juno Temple only makes Hardy funnier. They dutifully explain government cover-ups and extraterrestrial threat levels while he flails around like a cartoon man desperately trying to keep a boiling pot from exploding.



The actual action is all over the place. When Marcel tries to deliver standard franchise spectacle—the Xenophages, the end-of-the-world noise, the looming menace of Knull—the movie turns into a smear of digital sludge. Too much motion, not enough shape. And then, out of nowhere, it finds something joyfully stupid. Venom taking over a horse during a chase made me laugh harder than most comedies do. Those are the moments where the film comes alive: not polished, not elegant, just slightly crazed. Travis Burgess at *The Sacred Wall* nailed the central joke when he wrote that the relationship is "straight out of a rom-com," down to Venom musing about growing old together. If that sounds like tonal whiplash, it is. Whether you call that a bug or the whole point probably determines your tolerance for this movie.



The pacing lurches. The mythology is mostly dead weight. The big lore around the symbiote creator never becomes as interesting as one sweaty man and his clingy alien exasperating each other. But when the credits hit, I realized I was going to miss this strange, malfunctioning series. So much blockbuster filmmaking now feels designed by committee to trigger the fewest objections possible. *Venom: The Last Dance* is too messy, too affectionate, and too weird for that. It does not ask to be respected. It just wants you in the passenger seat.