Venom: The Last Dance

In Venom: The Last Dance, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his symbiotic partner, Venom, find themselves on the run from both the law and the formidable Knull, the King in Black. As fugitives, they navigate a series of dangerous encounters while trying to clear their names and stop Knull from escaping his prison.

Venom: The Last Dance Review

Despite the fact that the last few years have seen Slim Pickens riding the MCU ever closer to a cinematic holocaust, studios like Sony continue to attempt to replicate the billions-dollar money-printing phenomenon of Marvel’s Phases 1 through 3 by taking a swing at their own “cinematic universe.” So far, none have come close, and most have fizzled faster than Kamala’s post-debate popularity rating. Venom: The Last Dance doesn’t seem likely to change the calculus.

That much of this sequel consists of Eddie and Venom wandering lost in the desert is the perfect metaphor for the rest of the film. As each useless scene begins with an always needless and often redundant exposition dump or recap, and the two main characters bounce from one meaningless locale to the next with no particular plan of action, participating in no fewer than two musical interludes, one of which includes a dance number, it quickly becomes clear that first-time director/ “experienced” screenwriter Kelly Marcel (Fifty Shades of Grey) was in over her head.

The Last Dance is also a technical mess with no sense of distance between set pieces or the passage of time. Marcel appears to have no instinct for where to point the camera to take advantage of anything that might look “cool.” Scenes, too, are a broken rhythm of either highly frenetic, sometimes overly dark, action sequences with so many quick cuts and similar-looking fodder characters as to render them worthless, or they are overlong and packed with redundant and/or meaningless filler dialogue. The villain is beyond generic, and his presence and motivations are so underutilized and underwhelming that one wonders how much worse AI screenplays could be. Mindless, identical, and with one of cinema’s dumbest intentional design flaws/plot conveniences, his henchmen are even less impressive.

Moreover, its bloated cast of undeveloped (not under-undeveloped) characters seems only to exist to either awkwardly force the plot along, deliver humorless gags, or spin off the franchise.

Venom: The Last Dance is a shockingly boring film with a screenplay that feels as though a middle schooler wrote it.

WOKE ELEMENTS

DEI: Doubt Casting Casting

• As always, the number one problem with DEI initiatives is that they cast doubt on the qualifications of every woman and high-melanin-level actor.
  • A smattering of casting of some tertiary and background characters seems forced—namely, the number of mildly attractive women scientists below AREA 51. While the number of male-to-female scientists is growing closer to 50/50 in the U.S., it remains a male-dominated fellowship. In Venom: The Last Dance, the number is about three to one, female to male.

Cinematic Replacement Theory

• Spoiler

  Assuming that this movie makes enough money to warrant a spinoff, they’ve set it up so that the only symbiote left is some random chick with superspeed and lighting powers. As far as I can tell, she’s an original character who appears far more powerful than Venom. Her presence in the film is unsatisfying and unwarranted, and she appears to exist only to become the female replacement for Venom.
  . She only appears in the film’s last few minutes, so it’s not enough to knock the score down too much.

G.I. Jane

• At least one of the special forces troops sent to capture the superstrong, superfast, super-ferocious Venom is a chick. There are currently no combat female special forces operatives in the U.S. because none have had the physical attributes to successfully complete the training courses.