Here’s how little the third Venom movie has been on my radar: last weekend, rather than go to the movies, I went with my girlfriend and her brother to the New York City Comic Con. A good time there was had by all, but as we were leaving, my girlfriend spotted a billboard for Venom: The Last Dance. My girlfriend is not big on movies or superheroes–high fantasy is her thing–asked what that movie was. I said it was a sequel to a so-so movie series where Sony is trying to make a Spider-Man Cinematic Universe seemingly without Spider-Man. I didn’t think much more about it beyond that at the time.
That was last week, and then I realized it was coming out this weekend. I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to see it, but I did take last weekend off from going to the movie, so maybe I can make up for it with a trip to see a (probably) mediocre Venom movie before I see something that looks much cooler like Conclave the following day.
Picking up pretty much at the exact same moment as the Spider-Man: No Way Home post-credits scene, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy, who also got a story credit) and his symbiote Venom are zapped back to their own universe to learn they are, in fact, suspected in the murder of Venom: Let There Be Carnage‘s Detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham). Knowing this and otherwise stuck in Mexico, the two decide to go to New York where Eddie knows of a judge he thinks he can blackmail to get out of trouble from his investigative reporter days. However, Mulligan is not as dead as he appears to be in that he was kept alive and recovered by Area 51, under the direction of General Rex Strictland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Dr. Teddy Paine (Juno Temple). Strictland and the military see all alien life as potential enemies to be captured and eliminated as necessary while Paine thinks aliens could be friendly and wants to prove it.
The audience should already know that Venom and the other symbiotes are, potentially, friendly after a fashion. However, there is a major villain out there as Knull (Andy Serkis), the god of the symbiote race that is imprisoned inside a planet, may have a way out if he can get his hands on a condex, and the combined Venom form has it. Knull has dispatched alien hunter creatures called xenophages, regenerating things that shoot the blood of enemies out the back of their necks after eating them, to find a codex and bring it back as a codex is the one thing that can release Knull from his prison. If he were to get loose, that would be the end of all life everywhere, but there is a way to stop that. It just may be a bridge too far for Eddie and Venom to pull off.
How best to put this…Venom movies are rarely better than decent popcorn flicks, but this one is sort of an odd thing. It’s not aggressively bad, but it’s also not particularly interesting. It’s a movie that has odd ideas that seem like something that came out of left field, but then doesn’t really know what to do with it. Temple’s Dr. Paine is introduced with a bizarre dream/flashback sequence that seems a little bizarre to be believed, and one of her top scientists has a thing for Christmas decorations. Do these things amount to anything? Not really. Ejiofor’s character is a stock military lesser antagonist, Knull is barely in the movie and his face isn’t even really shown until a mid credits scene that may be breaking the fourth wall, and Graham is barely a presence, but that last part may just be what the script is asking for. Did we need Venom to share a dance with the only other character to appear in all three movies, Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu)? Not really, and even the movie seems to acknowledge that it’s a dumb idea.
But then again, it’s also not a movie that sits still. There’s never a moment where it seems like nothing is happening, and then there’s this odd hippie family, led by a father who wants to see an alien. The patriarch, played by Rhys Ifans, and his whole family seem like refugees from some light indie comedy, and while I never found them compelling, I did like seeing them when they came on. That could basically describe the best moments in any Venom movie: it’s amusing without having a laugh-out-loud moment while often doing this cringeworthy scenes, like in this one where Venom and Mrs. Chin dance or the previous movie where Venom went to a rave for some reason while also having these minor moments like Eddie and Venom’s general interactions in the second movie or this one whenever Ifans and his family showed up. Intercut these moments with more stock characters and the occasional clever use of Venom’s symbiotic form, and there’s something that’s not all that good, but at least isn’t howlingly awful. It’s a movie that is at best mediocre with moments that would be removed from a better movie. And that is all I have to say about that.
Man, I hope Conclave is as good as it looks.
Grade: C-
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