Venom: The Last Dance (2024)

PG-13 for the hero biting people's heads off.  Like, it's not like the movie ever embraces the concept of an R-rating, but it keeps things edgy.  Like, it's the Mountain Dew of superhero movies.  They swear...just enough to get the PG-13.  They kill people and it's just gross enough to be edgy without actually being over the top.  It's almost something all the time.  So keep all of this in mind when watching because it's not for kids, but it's also not for adults.

DIRECTOR: Kelly Marcel

Aw geez. 

I only have Kraven the Hunter left and then we can all say goodbye to the Sony Spider-Man Universe of Heroes and Villains (or something like that.)  Before even I talk about the odd masochism of watching these movies, I'd like to establish that I've never cared for the Venom movies.  Golly, there was a push to say that the Venom movies were amazing.  I knew that Venom, as a film concept, was a terrible idea.  My big foundation for my argument was that Venom couldn't even sustain a proper comic book, let alone a movie franchise.  But things changed since the first Venom movie.  Donny Cates wrote one of the most amazing Venom runs of all time, shifting my perspective on whether or not that character had legs.  And I'll tell you what, Venom movies are still pretty bad.

But I know that there's this push to really throw Sony under the bus for making Razzie level bad movies.  (I hate the notion of the Razzie, so I don't want to harp on that too much.) These movies are bad.  I'm glad that they are stopping with the extended universe Spider-Man related movies.  I have written the following diatribe too many times at this point.  Sony is the last company producing films by the old rules.  Maybe this doesn't apply to their animation division.  But the way that they approach big budget action movies is by the late '90s and early 2000s attitude of "extreme is better."  They honestly refuse to do anything that is vulnerable or subdued.  Instead, everything is showing off what could be done with a character instead of what should be done.  I think that's the second time I've quoted Ian Malcolm in a review in a couple of days.

So let's specifically talk about Venom 3.  It was the close of a franchise.  But is it?  This is not the crux of my argument about why this movie is so phenomenally dumb.  (By the way, I'd like to point out that, for some reason, my brain lights up with genuine excitement to watch these Sony Spider-Man spin-offs each time they show up on Netflix.  I don't want to watch them ironically.  I want to watch something new Spider-Man related and I tend to like things.  That means I go into a lot of these movies with unjustified hope.  Also, I like these movies more than others do, which is not to say I like them.  I just don't think that they are the abominations that people make them out to be.  They're normal bad.) One of the biggest frustrations about the Star Trek franchise, especially when it got to The Next Generation films, was Star Trek: Nemesis.

Nemesis was a bad movie. It was bombastic.  It lacked soul.  It was throwing everything at the camera, which ironically made the movie boring.  It was trying to hard to close out something on a bang that it ultimately sacrificed what goodwill the franchise had been slowly spending since First Contact.  But the worst part was that you could feel the studio putting its hands all over that movie, hoping to squeeze out the potential for more money down the road.  Both Venom and Star Trek promised the close to a franchise, wrapping up whatever threads were open to these characters.  We were offered a sense of closure, but the studios decided to keep opening those doors to future adventures.  Why?  The characters didn't need those future stories.  The studio wanted to make a lot of money.

I don't think the version of Venom: The Last Dance was probably the story that fit the movie best.  I bet there's a Last Dance draft that is far more interesting because it took bigger chances.  The reason that I'm saying this is obvious to some people.  The movie ends with a tease of Knull promising to destroy Earth. But, also, if you were making a final Venom movie, you'd have Knull be in it.  I mentioned Donny Cates above.  Knull is Donny Cates's creation.  He make the symbiotes actually have a story worth telling.  Knull was a top tier villain.  If you can believe it, Knull is Thanos level.  The King in Black storyline took a long time to tell and when the confrontations in those books came to fruition, holy moley was it worth it.  Someone behind the scenes of Venom: The Last Dance read the Knull comic book.   They knew that they could print money with Knull.  The problem was...Knull needed a minute.

You know how Thanos took a while to build up?  Even DC understood this with a version of Darkseid that never really happened outside of Zack Snyder's Justice League.  When you have a truly awful threat, you need to build it up.  Now, Venom: The Last Dance decided to introduce Knull.  They knew that this was a character worth giving gravitas to.  Unfortunately, they also wanted to be the guys who said that this was the story that was going to close the Venom / Eddie relationship.  They wanted both.  Oh my goodness, they wanted to have the benefit of drawing in audiences, promising them that the character that they loved over the course of these three films, was going to have some kind of consequence.  You can't have both.  You can't prop up a future movie and also sell that this emotional resolution was going to happen.  It's corporate crap all over this movie.  In an attempt to do both, they ruined either potential story.

Knull is absolutely wasted in this movie.  I've made it clear that there clearly was supposed to be a Venom 4 or other stories that would have made this story set up. But let's talk about how even this movie ruined Knull.  I've read the Donny Cates books.  I was so interested in this character that he created that I read back issues and played catch up.  They were honestly that good. But Knull is complicated as crap.  Even after all this time, I only kind of understand the inner workings of this character.  So when you start your movie with a "Once upon a time" two minute story of a character that we had no association with?  What are you doing, my guy?  I don't want an off-camera villain.  I want to understand what makes that character tick.  And then, The Last Dance even butchered that.  They took words that were said in those comics and just used them as Macguffins.  

The Codex frees Knull because Eddie died?  What kind of logic is that?  Honestly.  I don't understand that at all.  The movie just wants me to believe something because it told me to.  Yes, in the comics, Knull was collecting the Codexes.  But they were a database of every human who had bonded with a symbiote.  These xenophages (dumb, by the way) shouldn't even exist.  It's an entire race of creatures that exist for a specific scenario?  On top of that, they're functionality is really suspect.  For those who are just reading my blog because they weren't planning on watching the movie, the creatures can only see the Codex if Eddie is fully Venomed up.  I'm talking about "fully".  The monsters can't even see Venom if he's using his powers.  It's only if Venom is completely covering Eddie.  That's too much of a weakness, guys.

Which leads to this movie dumbing down everyone, not just its audience.  Eddie even verbalizes that they shouldn't go full Venom.  Venom says to Eddie that he can't go big and Venom is terrified by the xenophages.  Okay.  Seems like you have a pretty concrete plan on how to survive this mess.  So why in the holy hell did they Venom up just so they could dance with Mrs. Chen?  The pivot of this movie's third act is founded on a joke fan service moment.  Honestly, the character actually had to change motivation so the story could go on.  For a long time in the movie, Eddie's doing just fine.  It seems like he dug himself out of the hole that the character had gotten himself into only to acknowledge that the plot wasn't moving forward, so he got himself captured.  What?  And the movie has a bunch of these moments.  

And the narrative backpedaling?  My goodness, Venom: The Last Dance.  You keep teasing the notion of Spider-Man.  You even played ball with the MCU's Multiverse stuff.  The first few minutes, you embrace that multiverse stuff.  At the end of your last movie, you have the symbiote remember all the memories of the other universes.  And nothing?  That has nothing to do with the movie?  Again, I cannot stress how much corporate interference is in this movie.  When this whole multiverse thing started, Cristo Fernandez was just finding the mildest amount of fame on Ted Lasso.  But now that Ted Lasso is next level and Fernandez is well sought after, the movie wanted to use that character despite his tie to the Venom series is something that they didn't want to use.  Do you know what backs that up?  Juno Temple is also in this movie!  They're trying to appeal to a specific market in direct opposition to the story trying to come out of this film.

How did so much talent get attracted to this movie?  It is all charts and slides from the first movie going to talent agents saying "This movie is going to make a billion dollars?"  I don't know what part of this movie feels like a passion project.  It is cold and dead throughout.  The emotional reveal of the symbiote sacrificing itself for Eddie might be one of the most meh sequences I've ever seen.  It was a franchise that never really hit any highs, but I also didn't want to see it go out on such a corporate, dead low.  Geez, there's very little about this movie that is redeemable.  Again, I like these movies more than others do.  I think I probably still had a mildly good time occasionally.  But if you tell me that I saw a good movie, I would have to fight you tooth and nail there.  This is quintessentially what is wrong with Sony and they need to learn from their mistakes instead of constantly doubling down.