2018 Poison is janky and often boring, but the gap between the film’s standard superhero brawler script and Tom Hardy’s.What if I get into the lobster tank?improvisations in the dual leads as reporter Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote give the end product an undeniable appeal. PoisonDespite itself, it’s weird and funny in a way that very few superhero movies are anymore.
Unfortunately, the sequel is the one from 2021 Venom: Let there be carnagerejects the tension between impulsive performance and by-the-book plotting, and leans toward Hardy’s performance as comedy, with mixed results. And now the so-called last part (at least that’s the title, Venom: the Last dancesuggests) unleashes his wide alien jaw and tries to inhale an Eddie/symbiote raunch comedy road trip and a totally serious, high-stakes, ensemble sci-fi action movie at the same time.
Retrieving the events of Venom: Let there be carnage (as well as a credit scene from Spider-Man: No way home), The last dance opens with Eddie (Hardy) and the Venom symbiote (also Hardy) on vacation in Mexico, where they learn they are wanted for the murder of Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham). Mulligan was seemingly killed in the final film by Carnage’s fiancée, Shriek, but he survived thanks to symbiote synthesis. Eddie and the symbiote decide to go to New York, because Eddie, still an investigative journalist with significant achievements to his name, Last dance doesn’t do much to remind viewers of that – remembers that he has dirt on a judge there, and can use it as blackmail to clear his name. Yeah, definitely, totally, I think.
Shortly afterwards, they realize that they are being hunted by even more powerful forces. As an opening montage and some lore explain, Knull (Andy Serkis), the god of symbiotes and the void, who looks like the lead guitarist of a goth band, wants Eddie and the symbiote “codex.” That’s kind of a metaphysical thing they possess, because their host-symbiote bond is essentially uniquely strong. Knull needs the codex to unlock his space prison so he can destroy all life in the universe, so he’s sent a group of hunter-killer monsters to Earth to get them.
This Knull thing feels like it came out of nowhere in this series, and that’s because it’s Marvel Comics continuity, published basically at the same time as the 2018 release. Poison was shown in theaters. Last dance lifts Knull’s character design and backstory, as well as the concept of codexes and the idea that the symbiotic homeworld is a prison, from the work of writer Donny Cates and artist Ryan Stegman, who created Knull as the main antagonist of their wildly popular 2018 run on Poisonwhich culminated in the King in black crossover event.
Winter hardy and Last dance director/co-writer Kelly Marcel even uses lines from Knull’s reveal problem as mic-drop moments, when a character hisses impressively: “The darkness has teeth.” Which would be much nicer if Cates and Stegman had not remained in the dark about the film adaptation of their work. Last dance — they discovered it from a trailer. That seems to be the case taking out and aboutbut things are far from looking good for Sony and Marvel Entertainment.
Anyway: God of symbiotes. Requires Venom’s codex. CG fighter monsters from space. (Xenophages, a borrowed sample from Larry Hama’s 1996 Venom: The hunted.) Do you have all that? Because we haven’t even met the rest of the vast area yet human cast from Last dancewho come equipped with their own backstories, goals and personality traits. Juno Temple plays a symbiote-sympathetic scientist with a sad childhood. She feuds with Chiwetel’s xenophobic general Ejiofor, who wants to halt her research and eliminate her many captured alien symbiotes. Rhys Ifans plays an anachronistic aging hippie father whose lifelong dream is to meet an alien.
The idea of expanding the cast Last dance to include an interest beyond Venom’s is noble enough. Much ink has been spilled about how Sam Raimi’s dedication to including the “little people” of New York City as players in his Spider-Man trilogy gave these films a vital, humanizing tone. Modern, interconnected superhero films usually only have time for superheroes (or characters who will become superheroes at some point in the upcoming franchise installments), and that almost always works to those films’ detriment.
But Venom: The Last Dance is so buried in its moving parts that he can’t do it justice, despite Neville’s best efforts. (She makes her directorial debut here, having worked as a screenwriter on both previous Venom films 50 shades of gray.) The last dance doesn’t exactly fluctuate between the bad, bad road trip of Venom and the rest of the characters: it skips over its tracks like a runaway train, cutting straight from a serious moment of a woman reflecting on a long-held childhood sadness to a dance intermezzo on ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’. It’s like Eddie and Venom are there The hangoverbut everyone else is in the very serious parts of Independence Day.
Even Last dance‘s take on Eddie and the symbiote’s relationship is unconvincing this time. Based on Last dance alone, it’s clearly unclear why Eddie would willingly share his body with this alien parasite, which poses a real problem for the film’s intended emotional core. Here, Venom isn’t two characters in a messy but serious relationship, working toward a shared goal (at least not beyond “survival”). Eddie is a man whose body is controlled by the whims of an asshole toddler who cannot be reasoned with. That is, until the exact moment Last dance‘s climax requires the symbiote to actually be a character, rather than a series of jokes, after which it simply transforms into a completely different person.
The original Poison found success in the mess of Hardy’s courageous performance, with the stakes as mundane as Eddie’s interaction with his ex and her aggressively normal new boyfriend after they see him feverishly climbing into a restaurant’s lobster tank. Last dancehowever, removes every human consideration from the equation of Eddie’s life – every social bond, every personal goal, every stake smaller than “aliens and the government are trying to kill us.”
So when Last dance tries to recreate the vintage lobster tank moment – when the symbiote draws attention by making Eddie behave erratically in a Vegas casino, nearly kills him on a wild Venom-horse hybrid ride, or throws away a full plate of home-cooked food in to the people who handed it to Eddie, in an act of unexpected kindness – there is no resonance. If Eddie Brock climbs into a lobster tank but no one who cares about him is around to hear it, does he make a sound? There’s apparently no end to the ways the symbiote can embarrass Eddie, but as long as Eddie isn’t meaningfully connected to anyone in the movie – as long as he’s lost to everything but Venom, and doesn’t have to worry about anyone else’s appreciation or worry about maintaining If you live a normal life, that shame is pointless.
At that point you just put Tom Hardy in a lobster tank just to put Tom Hardy in a lobster tank. And it turns out that that gets old pretty quickly.