Following directly behind the events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Spiderman: No Way Home, we pick up with Eddy and Venom who are being hunted by aliens straight from Venom’s home world. Venom has something that they need, and they will stop at nothing to get their hands on it.
Starting with the good things here: Tom Hardy. Despite how iffy all these Venom and other SONY Spiderman spin-off movies have been, Tom Hardy stands high above all others. He is great and the interactions that take place between him and Venom are always fun and entertaining and often get a laugh out of me.
That all being said, the rest of this movie is really tough. Story wise, this plot is incredibly weak and pokes holes in all the other movies in the franchise. The first movie talks a lot about how it’s nearly impossible for a symbiote to bond to a host, yet in here all the symbiotes are bonding to new people left and right?
Another odd thing about this movie is that for the majority of it, Eddy and Venom are on the run. Now for awhile that was an interesting, it takes an odd turn and becomes a buddy/buddy roadtrip movie and that makes it tonally, just fly off the rails. By the end it just feels all over the place and it makes the more emotional moments not feel as substancial because it doesn’t feel like the movie knows how it wants you to feel.
The first movie also spent a ton of time saying how the symbiotes wanted to get back to the planet they left, but in this movie it focuses heavily on how the symbiote’s home world is mainly just a prison for their creator and how they all loathed living there.
This movie also made some seriosuly baffling casting choices in terms of the MCU and Sony movies. Firslty, they cast Rhys Ifans who had previously (as recently as 2021) played The lizard in the Amazing Spiderman Movie. Then the movie goes and casts Chiwetel Ejiofor as a military general even though in the MCU he had quite a substanical role as Dr. Strange’s foe, Baron Mordo.
These choices just sort of leave you scratching your head and make you wonder if these casting choices were made simply to give actor recognition buzz to the trailers, and get theorists talking. In all honestly these characters could have been played by next to anyone, and it really just makes this current era of telling multiverse stories far more confusing.
All in all, I have really struggled with these Venom movies, and The Last Dance is no different. I ask the same question I asked back in 2018 for the first movie; How can you have a venom movie that does not involve spiderman? At the end of this franchise we have a venom that never once met spiderman, nor has ever branished the iconic mockery of the spider symbol on his chest. I’m giving Venom: The Last Dance a 5/10, and I’m hoping we will soon see the last dance of Sony Studios with these Spiderman villian characters.