Categories: English Movie ReviewsMovie Reviews

Venom: The Last Dance Review – Crazy & Nonsensical!

It’s crazy how far these movies have come. I remember the first few trailers for the first Venom movie, back in 2018, and how absolutely intrigued I was by them all. If you’d told me that they would have gotten a farcical trilogy, I wouldn’t have believed you. Here’s the best way I describe these movies: they feel like if the live-action Transformers movies kept going.

Yes, the character designs and visual effects are superior, but there’s not much else here that works for me. I think veering away from the self-serious tone and being a little more playful with it all is where the movie excels. It’s so ridiculous that it’s almost entertaining. The third act, in particular, is a ton of fun just because of how nonsensical it all is and how crazy it all looks.

I still love Tom Hardy’s commitment to this role, and you can absolutely tell this is Kelly Marcel finally in the director’s chair, deciding to just make this as crazy as possible—and I respect that. But as a movie, it’s nauseating. The first two acts are incomprehensible in terms of narrative. Things just kind of happen; characters are introduced with little reason for us to care (seriously, they did the bare minimum with Juno Temple and Rhys Ifans’ characters, plus they didn’t even try with Chiwetel Ejiofor).

It’s visually awful; all of the effects look so strange in the daytime, and the green screens are distractingly bad. I never imagined a Venom trilogy would end up being a mess that I’m laughing at. The best parts are definitely the Venom/Eddie dynamic scenes. But this movie manages to strip Venom from the screen for half the movie by writing him out for plot convenience, reducing the time we see them together. It tried really hard to make me feel something emotionally by the end, but I just didn’t. They didn’t justify it. By the end, I was ready for it to be over. P. S., if you’re in it for Knull, I have bad news.