At the movies: Venom: The Last Dance.

 

To see Venom³ is to know that either writer/director Kelly Marcel or co-writer/star Tom Hardy at some point saw Lucio Fulci’s immortal psychotronic freakout The Beyond and thought, “That giant jug of corrosive acid on the top shelf there… that seems a little coy and reserved.” And what V3nom gives us is something so ludicrous, with such a playground flourish, that you kind of have to enjoy the madcap daffiness of it all. That’s not even getting into a giant fight at the special effects factory/xenobiology lab/Area 51 that feels like the opening twnety minutes of Out 1 but with everyone wearing a colorcoded symbiote.

For three films now, we’ve waded through intricate superhero nonsense (which I say as a fan of comic book cinema) in order to get at the secret heart of the relationship between journalist/gadabout Eddie Brock (Hardy) and his metamorphic friend/brother/boyfriend Venom (also Hardy), an alien goo that’s as creative, useful, and kinky as the story requires at any given point. And now, they’re on the run due to a quick multiverse hop and the aftermath of Venom 2, where Woody Harrelson was an evil symbiote named Carnage who got his head eaten in the CG cacophony that kept intruding on the domestic drama of Eddie and Venom’s life, which felt like the most daring off-Broadway drama of 1967 with a little touch of a Ken Loach kitchen sink drama.

But more than that, they’re also on the run from Knull (Andy Serkis), the ruler of The Void, the primogenitor of all of the symbiotes, and a Big Bad who is imprisoned far away from the earthbound action we see. But having cosmic power means you can send heaps and heaps of hunter-beasts that shred their prey and expel their assorted fluids like a Water Wiggle, so that’s the engine of The Last Dance.

This movie is weird, but not in a way that’s particularly marketable. There’s digital thrills, and worldbuilding a-plenty, and this definitely feels like Sony’s Marvel outlet throwing a bunch of potentialities and characters out into the ether so they can pick up whichever way the wind blows in a year or so after their perplexing-looking but beefcake-laden Kraven The Hunter film comes out. This is a film made for the fans of the Venom films and character, but it feels much more like it was made for fans of Tom Hardy getting weird with it. And his approach to Eddie and Venom has always felt like someone who has worked out whole chaptered story arcs on AO3, finding stunning character moments and unexpected facets of this bizarre combination of two messy dudes who somehow make each other better than they were before.

They go to Vegas, they hang out with a hippie-adjacent family of UFO enthusiasts, they battle a quartet of dogfighters (which, if you know Hardy’s real-life advocacy, lets you know these animal abusers are going to get their shit righteously rocked), and they cross paths with a differently-abled Doctor of Science (Juno Temple!) who is the kind of symbiote ally that more alien races could use. There’s a dance number, some metatextuality, and an astonishing river chase where Venom is leaping between assorted critters like he’s acting out the paths of evolution, and it’s all so deeply strange and yet direct in focus that it feels like instead of suits in a boardroom that the team calling the shots were the table in the cafeteria who got slipped the Mountain Dew.

Is this a good movie? I don’t know. I don’t know if any of the Venoms are conventionally good. But when they let Hardy do his thing, Regarding the second film, I said it was a shame that there was no possible Oscar for an actor for incarnating a dialectical situation. So is this a recommendation? Absolutely, in that Hardy in his palooka era is never not worth watching- this is a cake made out of all the things you like but in unconventional proportions.