Venom: The Last Dance
Filmmaking is a tough business. Hundreds of films come out every year, released on many screens with strong marketing spends behind them and result in … nothing. At best they are discovered years later on video and perhaps get a lucky chance to be revisited after being missed the first time around. As William Goldman once said, “nobody knows nothing.” It’s so uncertain no one plans on the sequel or the franchise, on getting to tell more stories with these characters or that world. Hollywood history is littered with the corpses of those that did: Universal’s ill-fated Dark Universe; Fox’s advertising for Eragon as ‘Book 1 of the Inheritance Cycle’ and on and on. Throw everything in the film you’re making now, the conventional wisdom says, because there is no tomorrow.
So, what happens when the decision to make a sequel comes? Sometimes you get a bolt of inspiration, some bold new idea that speaks to the key themes of the original without repetition or rehash. Sometimes there is a logical next step for the main characters, the only thing logical for them to do. And sometimes you just create random scenes which go nowhere but eat up screen time allowing for a technically feature length film to be attached to the appropriate numeral of the derivation to separate suckers from their money. Sometimes you get Venom: The Last Dance.
Just a year since disgraced investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Hardy) first encountered the psychopathic alien glob called Venom (also Hardy), he and his ‘partner’ have fled his San Francisco home to hide on the Mexican coast and decide what to do next with their lives. Also, they momentarily got zapped to Spiderman’s universe and drank in a bar but that doesn’t matter. Instead, what’s next is going on the run when they are targeted by the US military (scooping up symbionts for experimentation beneath Area 51) and strange tentacled monsters from across the galaxy. Venom it turns out is the key to the release of an ancient galactic warlord (Serkis) who will sit on a throne and growl menacingly until someone or something takes care of his problems for him.
After scripting the first two Venom films, Kelly Marcel steps behind the camera to bring the clearest version of her vision for the character which mostly involves a lot of singing and physical comedy. The reality is the Venom films have been on the back foot since the start, a character who was conceived entirely in opposition to another character which cannot be used or explained. That leaves a giant gaping hole that can either be filled with new ideas building a fully realized character or can suck in everything around it like a black hole, crushing even the most interesting creations to a singular sludgy pebble.
Mostly it’s been the latter.
The various directors and co-writers who have worked on the series, and Hardy himself, have struggled to come up with a central thesis behind the character. Initially Eddie was an investigative reporter trying to fix his ruined life and relationship until he suddenly has an alien voice in his head (and sometimes controlling his body) enticing him to increased moments of mania until they could find some way to co-exist in a startingly interesting performance (I picked it as one of the five best of 2018). When its success demanded a sequel, the obvious question became ‘who are these characters and what do they want’ but few answers seemed to be available beyond ‘zany buddy comedy.’ They still struggle to find the equilibrium they need, despite working on it every single film and somehow always ending up back where they started … every … single … time.
The only real change has been a shift of focus, form Eddie’s personal concerns and desire to fix the injustices plaguing him, to Venom’s psychopathic wackiness and id-fueled search for instant gratification. His larger-than-life personality makes him the point of everyone’s attention, within and without the film, without ever exploring or discovering anything about him. Venom as we last see him is pretty much the same as Venom when we first meet him: he doesn’t change or develop, he just is and that seems to be enough for everyone. Eddie, on the other hand, diminishes continually, a victim of the extraterrestrial parasite attached to him, losing all his previous desires or needs to become a blank faced straight man who exists to suffer for Venoms various deeds. Hardy stares out windows like a soldier back from ‘Nam but still in the foxhole, muttering to himself and clutching one lonely shoe. There’s no telling what he even really wants except … maybe … to be rid of Venom. Maybe. Or to just die. He is not a person anymore; he is a Venom delivery system.
Which is the tale of the film itself. Nothing is connected or attached in any sort of meaningful way; things happen because it has been decided they must happen in the manner of a five-year-old hurriedly explaining a dream they just woke up from before they forget it all. One of the creatures hunting the pair leaps from a building in Mexico to the back of an airplane 30,000 feet over Nevada because it must to make the next fight happen. Eddie and Venom find themselves in the back seat of a modern hippy family exposed to a sing-along of ‘Space Oddity’ so that Venom can sing it in a resistant Eddie’s head. The pair invade a Las Vegas casino and partake in a song and dance number to Frank Sinatra standards because why not? That seems to be Marcel’s answer to anything that happens in The Last Dance. It’s a scene, it contributes to the run time, throw it in.
That’s about all Venom: The Last Dance has to offer: 90-100 minutes that sometimes have the title character in it. Sometimes there are scientists studying symbionts; sometimes there are soldiers fighting them; sometimes there is an evil space warlord who has nothing to do with the story or is involved in the climax in any real way and could be removed from the film entirely. A lot of the time it has Tom Hardy staring vacantly out to the horizon. One can relate.
3 out of 10.
Starring Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Stephen Graham, Peggy Lu, Clark Backo, Alanna Ubach and Andy Serkis. Directed by Kelly Marcel.