movie review
VENOM: THE LAST DANCE
Running time: 109 minutes. Rated PG-13 (intense sequences of violence and action, bloody images and strong language). In theaters Friday.
So long, “Venom.”
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
After six years and three wretched films, the unspeakably stupid comic-book movie series about a disturbed San Francisco newspaper columnist who becomes the host of a wise-cracking alien symbiote finally ends with “Venom: The Last Dance.”
Channeling Donna Summer’s disco hit, when it’s bad, it’s so, so bad.
Box office-wise, the trilogy has proved the crown jewel of what Wikipedia tells me is called “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe,” a Marvel outcast collection that also includes such gloomy garbage as “Madame Web” and “Morbius.”
One of life’s great mysteries is that “Venom” has grossed more than $1 billion worldwide. There are people, especially in China, who actually like it.
What will those masochist ticket-buyers get for their 20 bucks in “The Last Dance?”
A migraine, but I digress.
They’ll get to see Venom whip up a strawberry margarita at a Mexican bar while “Tequila” plays on the radio.
They’ll watch the alien drive to Las Vegas and perform a choreographed dance to “Dancing Queen” by ABBA. Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock then questions his own movie’s insane logic, saying, “When did you practice this?”
They’ll hear the deep-voiced symbiote, who looks like a creepy Power Ranger, reveal his dream of moving to New York City.
“I’ve always wanted to see the Statue of Liberty,” says Venom, who hails from the planet Klyntar in the Andromeda Galaxy. “And a Broadway show!”
They’ll learn about Venom’s love of horses. “Aw! Horsey horsey,” the brain-eating alien coos at one.
They’ll be astonished that, in this 109-minute film, Juno Temple as Dr. Teddy Payne — in a performance that borders on CGI — blinks fewer than 10 times.
They won’t be able to hold in their mocking laughter when Venom, Eddie and a family of UFO-chasing hippies sing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in an old van.
And, oh, will they be amazed by the wildly inventive plot. At the beginning, the bad guy — a downcast blonde named Knull (Andy Serkis, ka-ching!) — says he needs a device called the “codex” to escape his space prison and control the universe.
A villain requires a vague object? Unprecedented.
“It is the key to my freedom,” he yells in writer-director Kelly Marcel’s superhero Mad Libs script and then sends some other symbiotes to earth to find it.
The codex, we learn, is inside Venom.
You don’t say!
Brock, who is hiding out in Mexico because the government wrongly thinks he’s killed someone, has to escape both the deadly visitors and US agents pursuing him, including Rex Strickland (a wasted Chiwetel Ejiofor).
The buds then road-trip to Vegas, where Venom loses all their money at the slots and a drunk man urinates on Eddie.
Eventually, they wind up at a secret lab beneath Area 51 in Nevada that’s cleverly called… Area 55. It’s there that Temple’s Dr. Payne plies her trade and pries her eyes open.
The climactic battle at the base between a bunch of Venom-y symbiotes and Knull’s four-legged henchmen, who resemble the extraterrestrials from “A Quiet Place,” is blob-on-blob action. Static and unexciting. The heroes lose for 10 minutes, and then, presto, they win.
Hardy excels at playing unhinged wackos who’d make you cross the street if they were walking toward you. We don’t much like Eddie, find him interesting or care a lick about his future. We never have. But we note that he shakes and talks fast.
The ending means to stir our emotions, and it does inspire one: relief that it’s over.
Venom appears to be kaput, unless he pulls a Michael Myers. But in the post-credits sequence, villainous Knull, whose story isn’t resolved whatsoever, dramatically says his routinely evil work is not yet done.
Great. To quote one of the movie’s many unmemorable characters: “Why is this happening?”