Venom: The Last Dance: Well thank god that's over

Is there any series that's harder to explain than the Spider-Man-adjacent movies that don't actually involve Spider-Man?

Venom: The Last Dance
Written by Kelly Marcel and Tom Hardy
Directed by Kelly Marcel
2024

Sometimes, when discussing movies based on superhero comics, taking a step back to explain what their deal is can be, well, not necessarily enlightening, but definitely an interesting endeavor that makes you realize just how convoluted all of this stuff is. As somebody who has been reading these stories for decades, I’m fairly well-versed in the ins and outs of how various characters came to be and what developments they’ve undergone over the years, but I often wonder if any of this makes any sense at all to the average moviegoer. So if I’m going to discuss Venom, why not start from the beginning and try to make at least some sense of how we managed to get three movies featuring the character?

The original story of Venom started back in the 80s during one of Marvel’s first line-wide crossovers, Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars. During that story, which is much too complicated to explain here, Spider-Man and other heroes were on an alien planet, and when his costume got ruined, he found what appeared to be a new, high-tech costume that was made of some sort of liquid that obeyed his mental commands. However, in a later story, it was revealed that this was not a costume at all, but a sentient creature that had bonded with his body and was starting to act against his wishes. He managed to defeat this creature, which became known as a “symbiote” due to the way it would form a parasitic relationship with its host.

Then, in another story, readers learned that the symbiote had found and bonded with Eddie Brock, a reporter whose life had been ruined after Spider-Man exposed him as a fraud. Because both he and the symbiote hated Spider-Man, they became a villain known as Venom. But this character turned out to be very popular among readers, so he was turned into a sort of anti-hero who referred to himself as a “lethal protector,” using violent means to fight evil and protect the innocent.

There have been a variety of other developments, including the birth of another villain known as Carnage, who was an insane serial killer who bonded with the offspring of the Venom symbiote, leading Venom and Spider-Man to team up against him. In the subsequent years, numerous other symbiotes were introduced, and at one point, Eddie Brock even became a character known as Anti-Venom, although I’m not sure what that was all about because I had stopped reading by that point. As Marvel continued to expand the symbiote-related mythos, they eventually became crazy cosmic space-based stories, even introducing a symbiote god named Knull who threatened the entirety of the Marvel Universe.

Movie viewers might be familiar with at least some of the elements of that story, if only because the bit about the evil costume bonding with someone who hated Spider-Man was one of the plotlines in the third Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie. However, to understand the movies featuring Venom as a solo character, you have to take a step back and pay attention to the behind-the-scenes wrangling of character rights by movie studios.

When the Marvel Cinematic Universe began, it featured a number of popular characters, but Spider-Man was notably absent due to the rights to the character being controlled by Sony, which had released the aforementioned trilogy directed by Sam Raimi. Sony tried to reboot the character with a couple of movies starring Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker, but those were less than successful, so yet another version of Spider-Man was created and folded into the MCU. This seemed to have left Sony wondering why they couldn’t have their own superhero cinematic universe, so they made the bizarre decision to launch a series of films featuring characters who are related to Spider-Man, without actually mentioning Spider-Man in any of these movies (although there are apparently some ridiculous exceptions that are outside the bounds of this article, mostly because I haven’t seen them).

While creating movies featuring characters like Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven seems like a fool’s errand, since characters aren’t especially recognizable or interesting when they are completely divorced from Spider-Man, Venom at least was popular enough at one point that people might know who he is and enjoy watching his particular brand of violent antiheroism. It’s still at least somewhat strange to try to launch a character related to Spider-Man without acknowledging the connection (kind of like having Shaquille O’Neal play Steel without mentioning that the character was one of the guys who replaced Superman after his “death”), but it seems like it would be doable, and sure enough, the first Venom movie did it.

However, superhero movies aren’t allowed to stand on their own these days; they have to have sequels and spinoffs and be part of cinematic universes. So of course the cinematic Venom mythos had to be expanded and possibly connected to the other Spider-Man-adjacent characters. And that’s where these movies stop making any sense at all unless you have a comprehensive knowledge of decades of comics stories and know about the complex legal agreements that govern what can and can’t be included in movies created by different studios.

So here we are at the conclusion of the Venom trilogy, which has gone far beyond its fairly basic story about a guy and his alien friend and has started to involve interdimensional threats and both human and alien characters behaving in ways that are not only incredibly dumb, but also regularly violate the “rules” that had previously been established. It’s a movie that can be generously characterized as “total nonsense,” but is probably better described as “so stupid that it’s painful to watch.”

There has always been a little bit of a disconnect between the way the Venom movies had tried to play up the humor of the character’s situation and the frankly horrific things he ends up doing. Others have called the relationship between Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom a sort of gay love story, which I think is a stretch, but the movies seemed to want us to enjoy their banter and laugh at the way Venom acted as an inner voice of Eddie’s id. However, they also wanted us to take the characters’ actions seriously, with Eddie being horrified at the violence he became capable of when under Venom’s control.

This has led us to the point where Venom now alternates randomly between being a wacky force of nature and a being with serious motivations. He’ll go from exclaiming excitedly about tequila as he makes Eddie mix a drink while destroying a bar in a remote Mexican village to insisting that they are going to serve as a lethal protector and fight evil. They don’t do much of that in this movie though, since all their time is spent running from various threats and fighting monsters sent to Earth to capture them.

Ah yes, that’s the actual plot of the movie: Knull (remember when I mentioned him earlier?) is introduced as a white-haired guy who is apparently imprisoned in some other dimension, and he sends some monsters after Venom to get a “codex” that will help him escape. What is this codex? Why does Venom have it? Who cares, it’s just a reason to have monsters chasing our heroes, and even though there’s some attempt to provide exposition about the codex being awakened when Eddie briefly died in a previous movie and claims that it will be destroyed if either Eddie or Venom dies, none of this makes much sense, and viewers are supposed to just go along with it.

In one of the movie’s incredibly bizarre and stupid leaps in logic, Eddie and Venom decide to travel to New York by sticking to the outside of a passenger airplane. This is when an alien monster decides to attack, which is another dumb decision, since we had already seen it following them in Mexico, so why wait until they were in midair? Regardless, this mostly seems like a reason to strand Eddie and Venom somewhere in the American Southwest so that the action can play out with barren deserts in the background.

There’s some nonsense about the monsters only being able to detect Venom when he is fully “transformed,” meaning that he completely covers Eddie’s body. Once again, there’s no reason for this except for plot purposes. At one point, Venom takes over a horse, turning it into a Venom monster that Eddie is forced to ride while hanging on for dear life; why wasn’t this a “transformation” that attracted the monsters? The answer, of course, is “shut up.”

Lest viewers get tired of the Eddie/Venom shenanigans (which I did about five minutes after the movie started), there are some other plotlines that seem tacked on, as if they are vestiges of earlier versions of the script or only barely survived rewrites. Juno Temple plays a scientist who is working with symbiotes in Area 51, and for some inexplicable reason, we see a childhood flashback in which she and her twin brother were struck by lightning, somehow killing him but not her (this is setup for her own turn as someone who bonds with a symbiote and gets electric superpowers, but that moment is so anticlimactic that one wonders why they bothered with the backstory). Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a general working at Area 51 who is trying to hunt down Venom, and his primary character trait seems to be that he’s angry about a scientist at the facility wearing a Christmas tree pin in July. And in the most pointless subplot, Rhys Ifans is a hippie traveling with his family to visit Area 51 before it closes down, and after they give Eddie a ride, they just keep hanging around and getting involved in the plot, no matter how little reason there is for them to be there.

You can probably guess that there won’t be much to this story but a series of chase scenes, and you would be right. Ejiofor and his men chase Venom around but get slaughtered when the monsters show up. Venom keeps escaping by just walking away, even though the various figures chasing him should probably notice. Eddie and Venom keep bonding in the particular way that will allow the aliens to track them, and most egregiously, even though Venom knows what will happen, he insists on taking human form and dancing to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” along with the elderly Asian lady who had appeared in the previous movies and who just happened to be in Las Vegas at the exact same time and place as them. The plot moves forward because it has to get to the next thing, and if that means the characters have to behave stupidly to make that happen, so be it.

Eventually, everything culminates in an extended action scene in which more and more monsters attack Venom at Area 51, which allows the other symbiotes who had been held there to escape and bond with people nearby (even though previous movies had established that only a very small percentage of humans were able to do so). The whole climax consists of CGI goop flying everywhere and Eddie being unable to decide whether he should try to flee or join the fight against these unkillable creatures, which doesn’t make him seem especially heroic or even able to play an active role in what is going on.

And in what’s meant to be an emotional culmination of the characters’ journey, Venom sacrifices himself to save Eddie, but he does so in a way that highlights the ham-handed nature of this movie. You see, there was a scene earlier in which Ejiofor used some sort of contraption to dissolve a giant metal tank with some acid, which was only given the briefest explanation, apparently being the absolute worst possible way to decommission Area 51, which the government is in the midst of shutting down. The only possible reason to show this was so that it would be used later on, and sure enough, Venom gets Ejiofor to turn on the device and bathe both him and the monsters in acid, killing himself and destroying the threat.

The normal response to this would be to shrug, since it’s one of those expected noble sacrifices that happen in these types of movies. However, the movie wants it to be a devastatingly sad moment that will make viewers break down in tears. Or at least it seems that way, given that we get a montage in which Eddie flashes back to all the moments he and Venom have had together over the past three movies, saying goodbye to his friend forever. It’s so nakedly manipulative that it had the opposite of its intended effect, making me angry that the movie would insult my intelligence by thinking I would take it at all seriously.

While I came in to this movie expecting something dumb and generally entertaining, which would have been in keeping with the first two entries in the trilogy, I left it pissed off by its complete failure to be worth my time. While I may watch some movies out of morbid curiosity in hopes that they’ll be a somewhat entertaining diversion, this one was bad enough that I’m going to need to make up for it by watching something genuinely good so that I can avoid losing all hope in humanity.