Venom: The Last Dance review - Tom Hardy's people-eater bows out

The once invincible superhero genre may have finally hit the skids, but Tom Hardy’s alien anti-hero stays intermittently fresh in his saga’s supposed finale, styled by writer-director Kelly Marcel as a partial romcom between parasitic, people-eating alien Venom and his reluctant human host Eddie Brock.

Sony sparked the super-boom with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), only for their reliance on related properties to hasten its end with the calamitous Morbius and Madame Web. Venom’s ace is Hardy’s unlikely double-act as gloomy, whiny journalist Eddie and his capricious beast inside’s bombastic, buffoonish voice of God, which pushes standard secret identities to extremes, and privileges the actor over later digital additions, allowing stand-up-style riffs. Londoner Marcel, who wrote or co-wrote the previous Venoms and debuts as director here, has been Hardy’s friend throughout his film career, and an Anglocentric cast adds to the sense of a homely, blackly comic British sensibility making franchise life bearable for all concerned.

Venom: The Last Dance somewhat suffers as a Marvel Cinematic and even Spider-Man Universe outlier, forcing the speedy set-up from scratch of the symbiote species’ maker Knull and his Thanos-style nihilist threat, till he’s bound by his creations. Venom and Eddie’s shared form is the key to Knull’s release, which he sends his monstrous emissaries to acquire.

Marcel meanwhile introduces Dr Payne (Ted Lasso’s Juno Temple), whose lightning-struck, space-mad late sibling back-story fates her to work at Area 55, an alien research facility run by ruthless Colonel Strickland (an overqualified Chiwetel Ejiofor, pictured left with Temple, centre) next to Area 51’s now redundant tourist trap. Venom’s cathedral-wrecking battle in Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) has made him a high-profile magnet for both Knull and Strickland, forcing he and Eddie to leave a lazily imagined Mexican sojourn to go on the lam across America.

Marcel’s varied CV has ranged as far from superhero cliché as Mary Poppins author EL Travers’ moving biopic Saving Mr. Banks (2013), and after initial laboured super-set-pieces, a real film breaks out for a while. Eddie is picked up by Martin (Rhys Ifans, pictured above with Hardy), a former IT worker turned soulful old hippie seeking aliens with his free-spirited family. Ifans gives Martin dewy-eyed, soft-voiced moral rectitude, and as their VW bumps down the nighttime highway and he leads a singalong of “Space Oddity”’s lonely lyrics, a sense of contemplative, poignant quiet settles over proceedings, in an interlude more valuable than the main events.

The inevitable protracted final battle at least tries to integrate genuine jeopardy and emotion. Venom is a visually interesting creation, with his Alien knock-off, knife-toothed predator’s head belied by big, wet eyes, but the weightless digital punch-ups feel unreal, and being asked to shed a tear for the head-chomping lug is too much. As franchise fans from Star Wars to The Terminator will find wearily familiar, studios’ reluctance to leave a dollar on the table also requires a mid-credits coda which renders the finality and even logic of what we’ve just watched in greedy pieces.

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