venom: the last dance [launch]
Hoo boy.
The Venom saga’s claim to fame is the fact that it wears its silliness and stupidity like a badge of honor. It’s fairly clear that these movies know that they’re not the pinnacle of cinema and that they’re supposed to be stupid, turn-your-brain-off buddy cop movies with an emphasis on cheap laughs, the character dynamic between Eddie and Venom, and quite literally nothing else. So many people love this series, and for all the same reason- it’s silly, road-tripp-y, and just a smidge of fun to see the wacky hijinks two characters, both played by the same slightly involved and overpaid actor, get up to. There are, to my knowledge, very few movie Venom fans that truly believe these films are supposed to be The Dark Knight.
However, this is really messy.
I will never understand the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters. The concept of stripping Spider-Man out of a movie series about a villain vitally linked to Spider-Man in origin and motivation, so much so that the design of the character itself has to be changed by removing the white spider logo, is baffling and absurd to me. Between Morbius, Madame Web, and now this, it’s clear that this universe has no quality, direction or purpose. Its chief inhabitants never cross over, rarely reference each other, and have no overarching villain or connection except that they all have loose Spider-Man-sized holes in their stories. I thought I was ready to accept that when walking in, but this movie had different plans for me.
Before I start tearing The Last Dance a new one, I do want to make it clear that I enjoyed a lot of this. I do not hate the character dynamic between Eddie and Venom, and all of the hijinks with them were as fun as they could be. It seemed like the directors kind of wanted to do skits or shorts with these characters, but were forced to turn them into loosely connected movies instead. I liked that he was hungover for the full thing, and Venom actually got a few good laughs out of me, namely when he’s making fun of the hippie family when they first meet.
Speaking of which, I quite liked Rhys Ifans in this, as well as every scene in the van. I loved the singing in the van, the way Eddie interacted with the little boy, and Venom’s remarks that he would be a good dad. Rhys Ifans definitely was great and the right casting choice, despite the fact that he’s been in a Sony ‘Spider-Man’ movie before. I enjoyed some of the Venom transformations that they did nothing with, like the fish and the frog and the horse, but wished that we had seen much more of it. And I loved the design of the Xenophages, with the buzzsaw mouths on their backs acting as paper shredders. That was awesome.
And that’s about all I got.
There are probably a dozen things in this movie that are introduced haphazardly that never come back properly, not including the aspects that spring up out of nowhere so that the movie can get started, like the police officer on the news that gets Venom to realize he’s on the run. The film has some sort of weird obsession with shoes (?) that never comes back. Scientists in the labs are asked about their families that we never see before or again. There’s a weird focus on a woman’s Christmas tree ornament pin, who apparently was supposed to be a friend or a love interest to Dr Payne, even though that’s not established. Most egregiously, there’s a man shrouded in shadows that we don’t see the face of that we never have the identity of revealed who dramatically whispers about deploying “The Six”, which just turns out to just be a group of normal human military men who get killed in two seconds.
Why is there a random, laughably insincere subplot about a twin that gets struck by lightning (I was holding back giggles in the theater)? Why is Knull only in the shadows, literally never getting up out of his chair for a satisfying third act? Why does Dr Payne’s symbiote suddenly have The Flash’s powers? Why are all the cool Venom animal transformation ideas in the credits instead of in the movie? Why are we doing anything? In the film’s defense, I’ll admit that I did not rewatch either Venom predecessor in preparation for this, which explains my confusion regarding the Patrick Mulligan character, but I sincerely doubt that extended knowledge of two already cobbled-together movies would have made a viewing of the third cobbled-together movie less obnoxious.
The pacing here is all over the place. It reminded me of the second Fantastic Beasts (a comparison that movies view as a fate worse than death) in that it felt like a two act structure. Instead of a crisis leading to one final push from the characters and a battle with Knull in a new setting outside the lab, it was the beginning, the middle- and then it was kind of just the end. Some of the pacing was too fast, some of it was too slow, but all of it was painful.
The action was fine, with my favorite sequence being the one with the dogs at the beginning, but the Venom movies action-wise have the exact same problems the Transformers movies do: when the villains and the good guys look the same, they all blend together when they’re moving fast on screen. Like Transformer’s spindly crab-faced metal monsters smashing into each other, this movie turns into “Goo vs Goo” real fast.
I also did not care in the slightest that Venom “died”. Nothing about the first hour and a half of this movie aside from the title indicated that this would be the “one final showdown” it pretended to be. The ‘oh, look at all they’ve been through, remember that?’ trilogy recap at the wrapup point was insincere and unearned, partially because there were no other characters (besides Mrs. Chen) that stayed through all three movies to share the memories with, but also because none of this matters and Venom’s obviously coming back to life soon anyway.
Venom: The Last Dance is a messy, absurd, awkwardly paced time-killer banking on its one key paper-thin character dynamic to keep butts in seats. I didn’t completely hate all of it, but the vast majority of this is unadulterated fun repellent. And still, after all of that, I still understand why people like these movies that are complete crap.
