Venom: The Last Dance (2024) Review

 "Cute!  I promise not to eat it!"

-Venom

On the run from the law after the events of Let There Be Carnage, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom (Tom Hardy) start making their way towards New York City to clear their names.  However, the police aren't their only problem.  The U.S. military and alien hunters sent from the vengeful creator of the symbiotes are also on their trail and aren't too concerned if they catch Eddie and Venom dead or alive.

Minor Spoilers below!

What Works:

The best part of this movie is whenever Venom is acting like a silly goose.  We don't get it enough, but there are a few times where Venom just starts goofing around and having fun, mostly to Eddie's annoyance.  I would have liked if the movie had focused more on them having wacky adventures.

There are awesome a few scenes when Venom takes over various animals and we get to see Venomized versions.  We get to see a Venom horse in the trailer, for example.  I love the design of all of these creatures and I would have loved even more of this.

Finally, the action sequences are mostly solid.  The river chase was unique and fun and the 3rd act has some cool moments.

What Sucks:

I have to wonder if the Writer's Strike affected this movie's script because it's pretty damn bad.  There is a lot of terrible dialogue, unnecessary and clunky exposition, and a lot of the story is nonsensical.  

There are also way too many underdeveloped supporting characters.  We get a big chunk of the movie with Eddie and Venom hanging out with a hippie family on their way to Area 51.  All of this could have been cut.  The patriarch of the family is played by Rhys Ifans, who played Lizard in The Amazing Spider-Man.  I thought they might be doing something fun here due to the multiverse of it all, but nothing.  There is nothing interesting here.

The 3rd act battle involves a group of symbiotes taking over various scientists at Area 51 and teaming up with Venom to fight alien monsters.  That's a cool idea, but the problem is there was nothing to get us invested in the supporting characters, human or symbiote.  There were two better paths to take here.  Either cut all of these characters and just have Eddie and Venom on their own or develop the side characters, even just a little bit, to make us care.  Give us a reason to care about the scientists and soldiers.  It would have been interesting to have these characters put in such a desperate situation that they choose to touch the symbiotes and join forces to do battle against the invaders.  Especially with Chiwetel Ejiofor's character.  There was a lot of potential here.  Maybe I would have actually felt something when characters ended up getting eaten.  It just felt like a massive missed opportunity to tell a compelling story.  Instead we were left with shallow fanservice.

Verdict:

Venom: The Last Dance has a few fun moments, and pretty much all of them are when they got creative and fun with the character and abilities of Venom.  I think that's what we all wanted out of this movie and we needed more of that.  Unfortunately, the script is terrible, the many supporting characters are underdeveloped, and the movie, especially the finale, have a lot of wasted potential.  It's certainly the worst of the Venom movies, but it's better than Morbius and Madame Web.

 3/10: Really Bad