‘I’ ON CULTURE
Back to movies I watch so you can avoid them. Venom: The Last Dance certainly qualifies. It is bad. How bad? Well, I thought the second one was about half as good as the first, which was a bit better than simply OK. Not much better. And this one might be half as good as the second. Writer/director Kelly Marcel has put out a mess of a film that does have a few interesting bits but quickly becomes a drag.
Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), our hero, and Venom, his symbiote, are hiding in Mexico and getting drunk regularly because the murder of Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham) in the second film has made him the top suspect. What he doesn’t know is that a being called Knull (voice of Andy Serkis) wants the symbiote and has sent a monster called a Xenophage across the galaxy to track them down. Warrior Rex Strickland (Chiwetal Ejiofor), runs a secret lab under the about-to-be-decommissioned Area 51 that has captured and studies other symbiotes. Headed by Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple) and Sadie Christmas (Clark Backo), they spend a lot of their time questioning Mulligan, who it turns out is still alive.
The Xenophage tracks Eddie and Venom to an airplane and a battle ensues that leads our two heroes to a desert field, where Venom reveals that when a symbiote resurrects a host, as Venom has done with Eddie, a “codex” is forged, which provides a blueprint for a way Knull can use to escape his prison. But if either Eddie or Venom die, so does the codex.
In one of the few amusing sequences, Eddie is picked up by Martin Moon (Rhys Ifans) and his family, hippies looking to get to Area 51. They drop Eddie off in Las Vegas, where Venom loses all their money, but they run into their old friend Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), who brings Eddie to a penthouse and dances with Venom until Strickland’s people grab Eddie and bring the pair to the secret base. Strickland goes bananas and fighting ensues. And so on and so forth.
That sequence makes the film seem better than it really is. The plot has more holes than good Swiss cheese. Some of the back story seems to have no direct connection to much of the film. It seems more like the director wanted to add context and totally failed to make the connection.
Hardy has the dialogue down pat. After all, this is the third time he has been talking to his alien friend. Unfortunately, most of what he says has no real value. The pair, one living and one computer generated, are just not funny. Temple is so one dimensional that I noticed that she didn’t seem to blink even once during the entire course of the film. Ejiofor was good enough to provide some gravitas, except for one time he seemed to go crazy and quickly turn everything around by becoming sane. Backo, in a smaller part, was actually a standout. She didn’t seem to be a vital character but brought a lot to a small role until suddenly she was vital. Ifans was good as the hippie, as was the rest of the family.
The problem was, as usual, a really bad script. How often have we seen evil warlords or sorcerers or others who want to rule the galaxy? Many times, and most were far more interesting. At least Thanos had a sort of psycho environmental notion: kill half the living beings and clean up the environment. Well, sort of. Here we know just about nothing. And Venom, who in the first film was supposed to be a not very strong or important symbiote who simply got lucky because he could blend with Eddie, has somehow moved to a key center of the universe. And the Xenophages seemed to be able to beat anything but were totally subservient to Knull, who they had been able to imprison.
Even worse, things just drag on. Some of the fighting starts to get interesting, and then it’s over. And fast. The action takes place in seconds, followed by long minutes of discussion. The final battle, however, seems to go on forever. In reality, it was not that long, but it felt twice as long as the final battle in Avengers: Endgame.
This is clearly one movie to skip.