Venom: The Last Dance review – messy sequel ends series with a shrug

The recent, long-awaited, cratering of the superhero movie (with a notable Deadpool-sized exception) has led to a mad scramble – release dates pushed, marketing strategies tweaked, Robert Downey Jr bribed – and a concerned question mark over what the future might hold for Hollywood’s most commercially lucrative contemporary genre. The Venom franchise, which launched in 2018 to surprise success, had already felt like a throwback to an earlier time – a glossy and light-hearted burst of mid-00s nostalgia – but now, with its third and final chapter releasing at such a fraught time, it also feels like a reminder of a more recent time when these films used to mean more to audiences.

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Whether or not something like Venom: The Last Dance will jolt enough of a response remains to be seen (the second film saw a $350m drop at the global box office and the third is tracking for a franchise-low opening) but it’s at least a smartly planned conclusion to an inoffensively silly and low-stakes series, Tom Hardy and his quippy alien symbiote leaping off a sinking ship with a spring in their step. It’s not as catastrophic as Madame Web or as redundant as The Marvels or as annoying as Deadpool & Wolverine, it’s just about passable in a throwaway kinda way, blessed by a surprisingly brief runtime that doesn’t allow it to grate or exhaust. If only it amused and excited us a little bit more.

The novelty of Hardy sparring with a dance-loving, head-eating, chocolate-guzzling alien that lives within him wore off in the middling second outing, where the first film’s co-writer Kelly Marcel took sole credit. She returns here, also debuting as director, and brings the same struggles with her, failing to find the funny in the absurdist conceit, her dialogue quite staggeringly refusing to make us laugh even once. The franchise’s lack of portentousness has always been one of its major selling points yet it’s not translated into enough genuine humour, something that becomes far more glaring this time around. Hardy intensely commits, as ever, returning as the journalist Eddie Brock who we left last time as he was zapped into the multiverse, one where Tom Holland’s Spider-Man had just been outed.

But his time there is short, returning to his world after just one scene and a jab at how tiresome the multiverse is (it’s hard to tell if this was always the intention or a rethought result of a shrinking genre). A clunky and convoluted cold open tees us into the threat of an impending war as Eddie and Venom are on the run not just from the authorities but also another alien, tracking them to obtain a magic cortex that would help free a new Big Bad. Their journey intersects with an alien-seeking family (led by Rhys Ifans), the military (led by Chiwetel Ejiofor) and some scientists (led by Juno Temple) as well as a figure from his past (Stephen Graham). Arguably the strangest film about a film so thirsty to be defined as strange is the amount of British actors playing American …

It’s quick and brash and seemingly aware of how goofy so much of it is but it’s also awkwardly overstuffed. There are jokes without punchlines (a tertiary character’s obsession with Christmas goes nowhere), unnecessary backstories (Temple’s scientist gets a dead brother we never needed to know about) and a villain we never really get to see in full (he will allegedly be part of Sony’s upcoming, much-delayed Kraven the Hunter). While it’s a mercy to watch a superhero film of such brevity at a time when even evil clown horrors are running over two hours, it also has the stop-and-start choppiness of something that has caused endless headaches in the cutting room. Marcel is a director of ho-hum competence, and like many within this world, gets lost in a frantic, hard-to-follow finale of gloop and guns.

An abrupt, Maroon 5-soundtracked joke of an ending shows it all to be one big lark, a relief in a way that even the alleged conclusion of the series wouldn’t aim for out-of-reach emotion but also a reminder of its utter disposability. You might remember where this franchise started but you’ll be hard pressed to remember how it ends.

• Venom: The Last Dance is out in Australia now and in US and UK cinemas on 25 October