"Turn off your brain" entertainment has been overused that it's lost all meaning, but it's recently redefined with a solid example: Venom: The Last Dance, a movie so inane that I would have written it off it wasn't so earnest and endearing.
Somewhere deep within the multiverse, a long-haired eldritch being known as Knull has been locked away by the very symbiotes he created. In spite of his imprisonment, Knull searches the multiverse for the Codex, the key that could free him from his prison and unleash darkness upon everything. And it just so happens that a Codex has been found — and it's carried by Venom and his unwitting host, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy). From his gothy throne, Knull sics his toothy Xenophages, giant alien bloodhounds with a taste for symbiotes, on Venom, which forces Eddie to go on the run as well.
A dude so evil that even aliens with fangs and an appetite for brains are scared of him? And he's performed by Andy Serkis? Now that's worth the price of admission. Unfortunately for us, Knull is literally set dressing. Barely even a presence. Apparently, Venom: The Last Dance knows what the audience really wants: watching Eddie Brock and Venom bicker and banter as they hitchhike their way from Mexico to New York, dodging Feds like Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor, another Englishman playing an American in this movie) and Knull's Xenophages hunting them.
And that's pretty much how the movie goes for the next hour. Venom: The Last Dance jumps from set piece to set piece like it's got a quota to hit and VFX companies to pay, and the quiet moments in between are filled with non-sequiturs about stuff like Eddie always losing his shoes and dancing (ha!) with Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) to ABBA's Dancing Queen. The story is so bare bones that it's unnerving to watch its skeletal remains move on its own.
Despite this ghoulish affair, Venom: The Last Dance is solely propped up by Tom Hardy's charisma and effort to give the movie a sporting chance. Unlike everybody else here, Hardy knows what he got himself into (literally, as he's got story credits together with the movie's director, Kelly Marcel). Hardy makes dragging his feet in the desert and talking to himself for almost two hours surprisingly bearable, as he's got the down-on-his-luck schlub act down to a science; it's hard not to root for the little guy.
The movie's $120 million budget finally shows itself in the third act, as the screen explodes in a flurry of symbiote action and toothy violence that made the first Venom movie a sleeper hit. And ironically, it's during this time that Eddie and Venom's relationship takes a more emotional turn as the movie's title becomes more and more apparent. I certainly didn't expect to be moved by a ball of black goo with teeth, but when the movie hits you with a montage of Eddie and Venom from the previous movies set to Cat Stevens' "Wild World", it's hard not to shed a tear.
Venom: The Last Dance is both a greatest hits and farewell tour in one for the little symbiote that could. It may not a mind-blowing bookend to this weird Spider-Man-movie-without-Spider-Man franchise, but for a time waster you could do far worse.
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