by Mike Sangiacomo
Well, if you gotta go, this is the way to do it.
The third (and allegedly) final installment of the Venom movie trilogy is an overpacked action film rife with emotional scenes and a powerful, satisfying ending.
Venom: The Last Dance opens this week featuring Tom Hardy as the man with a black, slithering alien inside of him. Venom, created in the Spider-Man comics universe (where Eddie Brock has been both a hero and a villain), lives cinematically in a Spider-Man adjacent universe. The worlds two universes share some of the Spider-Man cast, but the wall-crawler himself is never mentioned.
The film starts out a bit slow, but once it gets into the nitty gritty of a mysterious alien force out to destroy our planet to recover some powerful gizmo, there’s no stopping it. At 109 minutes, the PG-13 flick moves along quickly.
Hardy doubles as reporter Eddie Brock, who plays host to the toothy shapechanging Venom, right down to the guttural voice. The movie follows exactly where the 2021 film, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, left off with an exhausted Brock wandering into a bar in Mexico.
He has come to terms with his alien passenger, but is not happy that his life is no longer his to control. He’s dragged into action when an interdimensional creature with powers similar to Venom comes after him and the other Venom-ish creatures on Earth.
Juno Temple is the sympathetic Dr. Payne, a scientist at Area 51 studying the creatures that have been captured. Without a host, they are squiggly black things in test tubes and cages.
Brock provides a bit of comic relief, but most of the comedy is supplied by a friendly hippie family of four on a mission to see aliens at Area 51. They are a bit typecast, but serve their purpose.
The big battle at Area 51 is a CGI feast, with a horde of nasties being fought off by Venom and a smaller group of shape-changing symbiotes who take over Temple and other scientists, including the Christmas-fixated scientist played by Clark Backo.
The ending of the movie is emotional and gives Hardy a chance to show his acting chops.
Director Kelly Marcel, who wrote the script along with Hardy, did a great job stitching all the leftover Venom pieces together and leaving the door ajar for a sequel that may or may not include Venom. She wrote the first two films in the series as well.
There is a brief mid-credit scene that hints a possible future film. The final post credit scene is a throwaway not worth waiting to see.
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