Venom: The Last Dance

There is something so sad to me about the first two films about McFarlane's iconic Spider-Man villain. Because it's unfortunately the case that extremely few elements of these films (including the new third film which opened in cinemas yesterday) have anything in common with the comic book character. And that's tragic. Wasted potential for all of us who always loved Venom in comic book form. Moreover, throughout this trilogy, so few narrative risks have been taken and so many obvious mistakes have been made with both the script and the direction, that sadly there are no extenuating circumstance excuses left to give. Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Venom: The Last Dance are a bad trilogy of comic book films that we will all have forgotten in a year or two.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is honestly one of the worst billion dollar films I've seen in my entire life. Gollum-boy Serkis' clueless direction, the awkward and aimlessly lazy script, combined with super-awful pukes of gooey computer effects made it an exhibition of how not to make an entertaining popcorn film based on a comic book character. In this third film, the co-writer of the script for the first one has stepped behind the camera and the tone is different. Eddie and Venom are on the run, both escaping from their own troubles. Brock is being hunted by the police and the FBI for the murder of Officer Mulligan at the end of the previous film, while Venom is now being hunted by the home planet's ruler and enforcer Knull, who has arrived on Earth with his army of slimy space monster minions.

Life on the run in this case, however, has not meant that Sony has made a dense, dark, unnervingly cool thriller spiced with some McFarlane-scented meta-humour. No, no. This is a child-friendly, daylight-influenced, super-predictably flaccid roadtrip movie about two buddies taking their last voyage together. Because that's what Knull's strict basic requirements look like. Either Eddie dies, or Venom hitchhikes home to his planet - again. The two will be separated no matter the outcome, and so in the meantime what could be better than to join a bunch of hibernating hippies and drive around several states, returning to the same jokes used in both predecessors.

Hardy is easy to like, for me. Always has been. However, it wasn't enough to make Venom a good film and he was in no way able to save Serkis' downright disastrous scenes in the sequel. When, in this final part of the trilogy, he does the same thing over and over again, and when the 'humour' in the contrast between methodical news photographer and batshit crazy space monster goes out the window, I feel like the whole film is slumbering while I watch it. There's no edge, no risks are taken, they never approach a tone consistent with the comic book character and character development is non-existent. We're simply hooked. When Eddie and Venom are travelling with their hippie friends through a snuff-dry USA to ultimately come face to face with Knull and his Knullers.

Is Venom: The Last Dance the worst film in this flaccid trilogy? No, it isn't. Nothing can be as horribly bad as Let There Be Carnage. Nothing at all. Is it on a par with the incredibly mediocre first film and therefore 'okay'? Not that either. Kelly Marcel doesn't have the guts to go all out here, there's a lack of character, imagination, humour and heart in a film that should have naturally featured Spider-Man. An entire Venom trilogy without so much as a second with Spider-Man is like trying to play the World Snooker Championship with a piece of string. It 'works', but you don't hit anything.