‘Venom: The Last Dance’ is a superficial curtain call for this spin-off trilogy

If “Venom: The Last Dance” is actually the last adventure for Eddie Brock and Venom, I’m concerned about who will take the helm to continue this wide open story. Because by the end of this film, I still couldn’t tell you who the majority of the featured characters are or why I should care.

Venom and Eddie (Tom Hardy) are closer than ever and back to their familiar antics. In fact, as the sappy montage at the end shows, this film included a lot of the same old stuff. You’ll see Eddie fearfully soaring through the air, Venom biting heads off, even a forced reunion with a beloved character from a past film. It feels like a tired, obligatory reach for the trilogy’s end.

The conjoined pair are on the run from terrifying killing machines sent by the creator of symbiotes—the dark God of the abyss, Knull. They’re being hunted because when a symbiote saves the life of its host—as Venom did for Eddie—a codex is created, and that codex is the key that will free the peeved Knull from his imprisonment.

That detail is made clear, but minimal character development of others, choppy editing, and shots lingering too long for no reason leave the film feeling otherwise disjointed.

There’s a lull in the middle of the film, when the pace essentially comes to a halt, but the ending picks up with some thrilling action and surprising heart, though it does little to invest the audience in the apparent continuation of the story.

The cast is full of wonderful actors, and the top five on the bill are Europeans giving their best American impressions. Hardy is a special talent, but Juno Temple as Dr. Teddy Paine feels miscast with an awkward American accent, and nothing about her performance portraying a convincing doctor (though I love that her “Ted Lasso” alum Cristo Fernández plays a bartender in the film).

Supervillian Knull is played by Andy Serkis—because obviously, he plays just about every motion capture character—and in the seconds we see him he’s teased to be a chilling, epic villain we won’t forget, only to be painfully underused and irrelevant. Perhaps he’ll be more important in future projects, but against who? Which antihero will he go up against?

While No. 1 at the box office, the film’s $51 million in North American theaters was the worst opening weekend of all of the “Venom” trilogy releases, which are widely considered tops among Sony’s Spider-Man Universe spinoffs.

However, if options to carry the torch aren’t Hardy but the other survivors of “Venom: The Last Dance,” I worry about future productions dropping to “Morbius” or “Madame Web” level.

Only time will tell if the universe evolves into something that pleasantly surprises or if the last dance was merely a handoff to a sequel no one asked for.

2.5/5

Scott McDaniel is an assistant professor of journalism at Franklin College. He lives in Bargersville with his wife and three kids.I