'Venom: The Last Dance' Slinks into Theaters This Weekend
by EG
It's the last weekend before Halloween, and theaters are set to be a battleground for spooky movies vying for the top spot on the box-office charts. The biggest new release is Venom: The Last Dance, a comic-book sequel, but it will be going up against two horror sequels that have ruled the last two weekends: Terrifier 3 and Smile 2. Read on for details.
Over the course of three Venom movies, Tom Hardy has done a lot to bring a modicum of gravitas to a profoundly silly story about a parasitic alien whose place in the Marvel universe cosmology has never made a lot of sense. At least to those not schooled in all things MCU. The fact that the trilogy has avoided taking itself too seriously has been both its saving grace and its limitation. It’s hard to invest too much in the usual bombast and mayhem and CG smackdowns when the films come off as goofball larks with way fewer teeth than the giant pointed chompers on the title character.
On the other hand, Hardy brings sufficient charm (and witty voice work) to his symbiote-inhabited character’s internal battle between id and superego to make each entry perting enough, even if they leave little aftertaste. And so it goes with Venom: The Last Dance, which caps the trilogy by going gleefully out on its own.
Graduating from her role as a writer and producer on 2018’s Venom and 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage to first-time feature director here, Kelly Marcel jettisons any Spider-Man adjacency and tries her hand at something no one on the preceding films has managed to do. Working from a story she developed with Hardy, Marcel gives Venom — as the goopy alien organism that took up residence in the body of Hardy’s former investigative TV reporter Eddie Brock is known — an origin story of sorts.
In a hastily sketched prologue, we meet a straggly-haired ghoul known to comic-book aficionados as Knull (an unrecognizable Andy Serkis, director of the trilogy’s last entry) who identifies himself with lugubrious grandiosity as “god of the void.” Seething about his symbiote children having betrayed and imprisoned him in some dark cavern in a distant universe, Knull dispatches a bunch of fearsome creatures called xenophages, giant spidery-reptilian things that love to snack on symbiotes.
But Knull doesn’t just want those ingrate offspring slaughtered. He needs a key in their possession to escape his prison. “Find me the Codex!” he bellows at the critters. Of course, the Codex is not to be found on any random symbiote. No prizes for guessing who has it.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.