Full disclosure: This reviewer hadn’t seen Venom or Venom 2: Let There be Carnage. Indeed, he assumed that Venom 3: The Last Dance, the final instalment in Tom Hardy’s trilogy as the titular antihero, would catch us up. After all, sequels should stand on their own meritorious hind legs. James Cameron does it well; Terminator 2 and Aliens quickly explained the rules, jammed in some expository dialogue, and we were away.

Unfortunately, writer and director Kelly Marcel is no James Cameron. Venom 3 is just terrible – representing one of this weary reviewer’s lowest moments for this masthead (potentially tied with Spiral: From the Book of Saw and Moonfall).

OK, the plot: Venom 3 begins in a cavernous CG swamp full of CG demons purportedly on a distant planet, introducing us to Knull (Andy Serkis, doing his motion-capture thing). Knull is the creator of the symbiotes; alien beings that bond with organic hosts to … you get it, Venom is one of them. Knull wants an object called the Codex, only revealed when human Eddie Brock assumes the Venom character. If he gets it, he’ll be released from his interdimensional prison and all hell will break loose. You know the stakes already; unravelling of the universe, dimensional gateways etc. Pro tip writers: If it’s always maximum stakes, there’s no stakes.

Back on Earth, Hardy’s Eddie Brock is on the run, framed for a murder that occurred in the previous film, and drinking his sorrows away at a bar in Mexico (a serious contender for least amusing scene of 2024). Eddie and Venom hit the road, pursued by Knull’s deadly minion (which is just a generic CG monster that blandly chases Eddie and Venom throughout the movie). For no reason, really, they go to Vegas and Venom dances to ABBA with Mrs Chen (Peggy Lu) from the other Venom movies (ok, no wait, this is the least amusing scene). Chiwetel Ejiofor and Rhys Ifans have minor roles, there’s a lab with more symbiotes, it ends in a 40-minute battle scene between various ill-defined CG characters slugging it out at a construction site. It’s grim.

Having seen the first 20 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this increasingly agitated reviewer knows the genre; everyone is immortal, there’s no blood, you can’t say “fuck” more than once, and there’s an Easter egg in the closing credits hinting at a sequel that would render what you’ve just watched as pointless. It’s not funny or B-grade, because it’s too expensive.

But the atonality of Venom 3 is new; the powerfully uninteresting dialogue, the robotic performances, the rigidly predictable sequence of events culminating in a character saying “this ends today” (or similar). In 2023, Hollywood went on strike against the encroachment of AI, but if this is the kind of drab slab of film that humans are writing, this exasperated writer says: “Bring on the machines.”

 

Venom: The Last Dance is currently playing in cinemas.