‘Venom: The Last Dance’ Review: A Long and Winding Tongue

With the 2018 film “Venom,” Tom Hardy locked himself into a three-picture deal, giving his time, talents and torso to this saga about a man named Eddie Brock possessed by a fanged, body-snatching alien parasite named Venom who pops in and out of his skin like a hyper-violent prairie dog. The overly plotted “Venom: The Last Dance,” written and directed by Kelly Marcel, concludes the trilogy by hammering home all that Eddie has sacrificed to merge with this impulsive, smack-talking goo blob. In the first movie, Eddie was an ambitious San Francisco investigative journalist with a fiancée played by Michelle Williams; here, he’s a filthy drifter on a Mexican bender who’s lost his career, his woman and his reputation. Forced to go on the lam to flee a murder accusation, Eddie makes a running joke out of the fact that he can’t even hang on to a pair of shoes.

In glimpses, this is a drama about a drunk who finds himself unbearably lonely despite being conjoined with a garrulous monster. Hardy voices both reedy Eddie and gravelly Venom and his roiling one-man-band of a performance continues to be the only reason to keep up with the films. Highlights here include the herky-jerky chaos Eddie/Venom causes as he mixes a Michelada while grooving to “Tequila,” and the moment when he’s suctioned to the fuselage of an airplane like a Garfield plushie and sighs, “It is so unpleasantly cold.” Eddie and Venom even detour to Las Vegas, the capital city of self-destruction, and dub themselves Thelma and Louise.

But these mild pleasures are overwhelmed by a barrage of underdeveloped supporting characters — Chiwetel Ejiofor as a general, Juno Temple and Clark Backo as Area 51 scientists, a hippy family headed by Rhys Ifans — plus a nifty spidery nasty who gobbles its victims like a scuttling wood chipper and, when sliced up, stitches its long limbs back together. There’s also a barely introduced major villain named Knull (Andy Serkis, the director of 2021’s “Venom: Let There Be Carnage”) who seems to exist only so that the studio can bridge this finale to some other future comic book flick.