Venom: The Last Dance Parent Guide

Unsurprisingly, Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote, Venom (Tom Hardy) are in trouble. Since tearing up New York City in his fight with Carnage, they’ve been lying low in Mexico. But this time, Eddie is being pursued by more than the law: a xenophage, a terrifying and hungry alien from deep space, is hunting them.

Venom recognizes the xenophage as a servant of someone called Knull (Andy Serkis), the creator of the symbiotes who now seeks their destruction. On top of that, a top-secret military program run by Commander Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) wants to imprison Eddie and Venom in Area 51 for examination. So, as always, Eddie and Venom only have each other. But will that be enough?

Although this script manages to scrape together a few laughs, it’s probably for the best that this is the Last dance – the film feels tired more than anything. It’s shedding loose plotlines all over the place as it staggers around. We’re not dealing with a lengthy film here, but a lot of the little subplots feel like they were added to pack out the runtime. Most of them were completely irrelevant to both the main plot and the protagonists.

As far as younger viewers are concerned, the issues here are almost identical to the last entry in the franchise. There are about a dozen scatological curses and one f-bomb, and the protagonist spends a bit of time drinking and nibbling on strangers who keep trying to kill him. I wish the film had spent more time letting Venom chew on people and less time fleshing out random personal details from the backstories of side-characters – that’s kind of the fun part of the franchise.

I don’t really dislike the film – the pacing was brisk enough that you don’t get mired down in anything for too long, so it’s not a bad way to kill time. It’d be a great movie to watch on a plane, but I don’t know that it’s much more than that. It’s hard to work up any strong feelings about the film. I don’t know that ephemerality was the filmmakers’ goal, but it sure beats the lingering stench that Morbius left behind.