Venom: The Last Dance Movie Review: A cacophony of unfinished ideas

Some films are made from screenplays that have gone through multiple drafts, a sign of a thoughtful pursuit for perfection. Some films make it very apparent that they are made from a careless, scribbled-out first draft. Venom: The Last Dance is peculiar in the way that it somehow precedes a first draft. It feels like you are seeing a real-time AI render of ideas thrown out by a room full of writers with different tastes, sensibilities, and ideas of what constitutes a film. Straight out of the gate, you see a menacing CGI villain (who looks like a character from a 2005 video game cinematic trailer) spouting exposition at an extraordinary speed that it reaches you before you reach for your seats. And even if you somehow imbibed all of his dialogue, you will be disappointed with how the set-up of the film is supremely unoriginal and uninteresting.

Director: Kelly Marcel
Cast: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Stephen Graham


Tom Hardy is back as the neurotic, twitching, morally ambiguous Eddie Brock. However, he shines more with his voice acting for Venom. The alien symbiote’s comic timing is perfect and comes as a respite. Ironically, the only interaction in the film that feels human is the one between Eddie Brock and Venom. You can feel their camaraderie, the wry sarcastic humour that only develops after years of friendship, and the perfect rhythm in which their lines play off each other. Contrastingly, whenever any two characters speak to each other, they feel like puppets controlled by the same puppeteer, spouting exposition instead of dialogues. The characters seem like they are feeding information to us, the audience, rather than having meaningful communication among themselves. Stephen Graham seems to have spent the entirety of the production surrounded by green screens in a performance that feels like a colossal misuse of the actor’s talents.

Even if all you hoped for was a big CGI spectacle, Venom: The Last Dance might still disappoint you with what looks like hurried and half-done visual effects. However, the alien creatures sent to kill the symbiotes were surprisingly well designed, despite the fact that they had the biological ability to emit highly powerful sound waves—the one weakness of the symbiotes—and they only used it towards the end of the film. Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays commander Rex Strickland, remains angry and frustrated throughout the film and we are not sure if it is Ejiofor’s reaction to being in the film or the emotions of the character. Juno Temple, who plays scientist Teddy Payne, has a considerable amount of character development, with flashbacks and strong opinions about symbiotes, but it is unclear how the audiences are supposed to feel about the character. She is surprisingly eager to show loyalty towards an invasive alien species, at the cost of endangering her colleagues but is also a heroic figure who saves people? The film also employs bizarre scenes to fill the gap between one important plot point to another. We either see something completely unhinged like an elaborate dance sequence featuring Venom and Mrs Chen, a random interaction between Eddie Brock and a hippie family, or just characters lazily walking into a lab and looking around silently for an uncomfortable duration of time.

Venom: The Last Dance feels like a desperate attempt to wrap up the franchise while also allowing enough loopholes to let the franchise grow if and when required. We do get a complete character arc for Venom but in true superhero franchise fashion, Venom: The Last Dance gives into the temptation of expansion and gives us hints for a continuation of the story. While the tagline ‘The Last Dance’ is clearly a ruse, there is a chance that the makers do mean it this time. So, there is hope.