'Venom: The Last Goop'

Venom: The Last Dance is allegedly the final film in the Venom series, a subsidiary of Sony’s Spider-Manless Spider-Man Cinematic Universe™. It’s not as good as its predecessor, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, but it’s still better than other entries in the SSMSMCU, like Morbius and Madame Web.

The Venoms, in case you don’t know, are a vanity project for star/producer Tom Hardy. Hardy plays a disgraced journalist, Eddie Brock, who becomes a superhero after developing a symbiotic relationship with the parasitic black alien goop from which the movie takes its name. Throughout Venom (2018) and Let There Be Carnage, Venom and Eddie heroically team up to save the world from other, different-colored alien goops, like a gray goop, played by Riz Ahmed, and a red goop, played by Woody Harrelson.

The Last Dance, however, does not find our heroes squaring off against parasitic alien goop of a different hue; on the contrary, there are other alien goops in the movie, and they’re all different colors from Venom, but they’re his allies, not his enemies. You see, it turns out the alien goops all fled the dark homeworld of their creator, Knull (Let There Be Carnage director Andy Serkis), and imprisoned him there. Knull is presented as a kind of goth Thanos; just as the first Avengers movie opened with Thanos’ stooge delivering exposition to characters who don’t need any of that information, so The Last Dance begins with Knull telling his minions stuff they already know. Those minions - which are like CGI hybrids of alien xenomorph queens and paper shredders - are soon dispatched to find Venom, because he’s the key to freeing Knull for reasons involving needing an excuse for the movie to happen.

The story also incorporates a scientist who is studying the goops (Juno Temple), an army guy who wants to kill the goops (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and a family of hippies deficient in goops (led by Rhys Ifans and American goddamn treasure Alanna Ubach).

Kelly Marcel, who wrote all of the Venoms, also directed The Last Dance, which allows her to take her disdain for coherent narrative to a whole new level. For example, near the end of Let There Be Carnage, a cop (Stephen Graham) gets an alien goop of his own (the color of which is sadly never specified)… but when The Last Dance opens, that goop has abandoned him, which we’re told but never see, and Juno Temple has to get him hooked up with a different goop (this one is green) to save his life, which we’re also told but don’t see. Why have him lose one goop off-screen and get a new goop off-screen? Why not just have the goop from the last movie carry over?

I don’t know, and I’m guessing neither does Marcel. These movies are primarily just an excuse to let Tom Hardy do wacky Tom Hardy shit.

Serkis may have understood this better than Marcel: Let There Be Carnage is the apex of the franchise because it’s 97 minutes, zero seconds of which are devoted to things like human emotion or real-world logic. In fact, the movie makes fun of the very notion that it could have anything even remotely profound to say.

The Last Dance, by way of contrast, has the gall to be 110 minutes, and it does occasionally try to inject some dramatic heft into the proceedings. This is not a good idea, as it often calls attention to how stupid the movie is; for example, one character’s tragic backstory (which is repeated approximately 15 times in their first 2 minutes of screentime, lest it prove too subtle for the viewer) involves being struck by lightening… but it unfolds in such a way as to suggest that Marcel may not know how electricity works.

There’s also some kind of interesting/funny subtext about immigration - the goops are refugees, after all, and Venom has become obsessed with visiting the Statue of Liberty - but it’s mostly an afterthought. Still, it’s kind of droll when Venom pointedly vows not to eat any dogs; I know this movie was in production way before Donald Trump warned of pet-consuming Haitians, but boy, did the makers of The Last Dance really luck out here.

The Last Dance is at its best, as all of the Venom movies are, when Eddie and Venom are re-enacting The Odd Couple (this is another reason Let There Be Carnage is the best of the three movies: it frames Eddie and Venom’s story as the kind of romantic comedy in which bickering rivals ultimately fall in love). Hardy, cinema’s current reigning king of silly voices, doesn’t just play Eddie with an inexplicable 1940s Brooklyn accent, but he also provides Venom’s monstrous speech - and, yes, two silly Hardy voices are better than one. A scene where Venom wraps a slimy tentacle around Eddie’s mouth and shushes him is a billion times more entertaining than all the alien goop fights in the world.

Indeed, it’s the lack of pretension that makes these movies so watchable. I don’t know for sure that the people who made Morbius were trying to make an authentically good movie, but Jared Leto pulled his method bullshit and Tyrese Gibson mistook a patently fake rave by “Martin Scorsese” for a genuine review, so, yeah, I get the impression that they took that shit pretty seriously. Hardy, meanwhile, reportedly initiated the Venom movies because his son likes the comic books, and he treats the material with the exact level of seriousness as a goofy dad trying to put on a show for his kid. If they do make a fourth Venom movie, I hope that it’s 80 minutes long and filmed from a script Hardy and Marcel concocted over a long boozy brunch and then never bothered to revise. When it comes to Venom, the dumber the better.