'Venom' is Over, and Tom Hardy Needs a New Imaginary Friend

We bid farewell to a franchise that didn't have much, but did have Tom Hardy jumping into a lobster tank.

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Venom: The Last Dance opened this weekend, and like all Venom movies it’s kind of slapdash and shitty. Also like all Venom movies, the emotional core of this third one is Tom Hardy bickering with an alien parasite who lives inside him and kind of just wants to party. The alien (Venom) exists as a sort of inner child, pushing Hardy’s character to try new, fun things, like eating lots of chocolate and gambling and dancing with a lady. Venom is ruining Tom Hardy’s life but also forcing him out of his comfort zone, usually for the better. The whole franchise is sort of like Scent of a Woman if Al Pacino’s character was a CGI Spuds Mackenzie.

Sure, there’s lots of the usual comic book bullshit in there too, the stuff we’ve all seen 17 million times already, where the alien has to fight off other aliens to keep them from destroying the universe or fight a more evil version of himself in the last act, but Tom Hardy grunting around, bickering with his alien, and jumping in a lobster tank to cool off is so plainly the main draw of the franchise that the filmmakers inevitably just yadda yadda through the other stuff, mostly for the better. If Madam Web (the last film in Sony’s Marvel Universe, of which the Venom franchise is also part) is the SMU’s The Room, a comically inept IP product created when a cabal of dopy suits tried to imitate Marvel, the Venom franchise is more like successful counter-programming: low stakes, star-driven, and usually pretty short, relative to superhero movies, without 16 unnecessary codas.

Of the three Venom movies, The Last Dance has the most plot points that make it feel like a Marvel movie, which easily qualifies it as the worst. In the first scene, Tom Hardy and Venom show up to a bar in Mexico (they’re on the run after a maiming a cop played by Stephen Graham — aka Tommy from Snatch) in the last movie. Tom Hardy wants to drink water and sober up, but Venom demands a Bloody Maria, so they jump behind the bar and start messily mixing up lime, tomato juice, tequila, and whatnot. Venom’s CGI black tentacles shoot out of Tom Hardy’s back and spin around the cocktail shaker and squeeze lime everywhere and he burps “We should be a bartender!”

The actual bartender, played by Cristo Fernandez from Ted Lasso, half-heartedly protests, and so Venom opens up some kind of wormhole and jumps into a different dimension. Then he jumps back again (or I guess into a new dimension?) and Venom croaks something like “Fuck this multi-verse bullshit!”

Does this count as fourth wall-breaking or is it an actual power Venom has? Venom movie plotting is loose to the point that I honestly don’t know. Since the whole movie can’t just be Tom Hardy and Venom making cocktails, even though you get the sense that most involved sort of wish it could, The Last Dance introduces its major conflict.

You can probably skip this part if you want to, but basically, Venom belongs to a species of other symbiotes. They were created by some kind of… evil demon guy, against whom the symbiotes ultimately rebelled for some reason (never explained, I guess because he was so evil) and trapped him in some kind of space prison. This prison is a void at the edges of the universe. But the evil demon guy, who we will later learn is called “Knull” (and when I say later, I mean during the film’s closing credits for me specifically, because his name came out garbled or whispered or so overly digitally processed every time it was uttered in the film that I never understood it), still has other creations that are loyal to him.

These other children of the Knull are called Xenophages, which are massive alien insectoids a la Starship Troopers. They want, insofar as insects want anything (unclear whether they have independant thought) to help Knull get back THE CODEX, some kind of cosmic blueprint doohickey that probably just says “MACGUFFIN” inside when you unroll it. The Codex just so happens to live inside of Venom and Tom Hardy. So long as they live in harmony, Knull can’t get his hands/tentacles/flagellae (honestly unclear) on it. And so to try to obtain the Codex, Knull starts shooting these insect Xenophages through wormholes to Earth. Wormhole transporting is a never-explained power that Knull has, which is not a criticism, by the way. If you ever start trying to explain why Knull has this power I will call the police.

Most of this is left unbeknownst to Venom and Tom Hardy at first, who see a news report on TV about Tom Hardy being wanted for murder. Despite already being in Mexico, they decide they have to flee. Seeing a Statue of Liberty tchotchke the Ted Lasso guy has on the bar, they decide they should go to New York. Venom has always wanted to see the Statue of Liberty and Tom Hardy adds some half-garbled justification about there being a judge there they might be able to blackmail. Would’ve been funny if they just made the corrupt official Rudy Giuliani. Missed opportunity, imo.

Meanwhile, there’s cute lady scientist played by Juno Temple, who studies symbiotes in a massive lab underneath Area 51. There’s a flashback to her playing on a beach with her brother when she’s a young girl. Her brother reveals his life’s dream, of one day working for NASA, and then a storm rolls in. They run for shelter, but get hit by lightning while they hold hands, killing the brother and giving young Juno Temple a scar on her shoulder (electricity, how does it work?). I guess this ignited in her a desire to study alien symbiotes for a living? None of it makes much sense now, but I think it’s supposed to be set up for some future movie.

On their way to New York, attached to the fuselage of a passenger jet, Tom Hardy and Venom get attacked by a giant Xenophage thingy, who can apparently track them because of the Codex, which they can only see when Venom “takes full form” (completely covers Tom Hardy with the black Venom suit with the big teeth and all that). The rules of how to kill a Xenophage are never properly established, but they manage to get this one sucked through a jet engine. Tom Hardy floats to Earth using Venom as a parachute, and the matter of whether all those innocent people on the jet managed to get safely to Earth on one engine or if they all burned to death in a fiery crash is left hilariously unaddressed. Those people? Who cares? Tom Hardy is going to walk around the Nevada desert with one shoe!

On this cross-country sojourn, the first other humans Venom and Tom Hardy encounter are a family of hippie alien chasers led by Rhys Ifans and his wife Alanna Ubach, who have sold all their belongs to buy a van to go see Area 51 before it closes. Along for the ride are a bratty tween daughter who does metatextual jokes (“Is someone ever going to call CPS?”) and a younger son with the worst child actor hair helmet I’ve seen since Liar Liar. Every time he was on screen I wanted to puke. (Kid, if you’re on the internet, don’t read this. It’s not your fault. I pin this solely on your parents and their enablers, who should be in prison.).

This all sets up a collision course between Venom/Tom, the symbiotes at Juno Temple’s alien lab (team up!), the Xenophages, and, sadly, the grating hair helmet family. Did I mention that the family also has a dog who does Scooby Doo reaction shots? Renorages? Ruh roh! (I wasn’t against it).

The Last Dance’s major drawback is that it has to do so much expository lifting to get all these mostly-unnecessary characters together for a big climax — which doesn’t utilize any of them very interestingly anyway (except as an excuse for the usual mediocre CGI). All this time devoted to set up both leaves not enough time for the Tom Hardy-dicking-around-with-his-alien-Drop-Dead-Fred that makes these movies any fun in the first place, and sets up storylines that the filmmakers’ hearts clearly aren’t in. This latest Venom was directed by Kelly Marcel (who co-wrote Venom, directed by Ruben Fleischer, and Venom: Let There Be Carnage, directed by Andy Serkis) and written by Marcel and Tom Hardy, though it’s always hard to tell how much leeway the creatives actually have in these kinds of movies in between board-mandated action setpieces.

The emotional climax of Venom: The Last Dance comes when Venom decides to pull a Randy Quaid from Independence Day (deliberately vague to avoid spoilers), vanquishing the Xenophages and making the world safe for little hair helmets again. Only Venom’s method seems to contravene every plot rule the film had established up until this point. Yet it is true to the franchise, in the sense of trying to get by purely on vibes without pausing to explain anything.