“'Venom: The Last Dance' review: A long and winding tongue”

With the 2018 film Venom, Tom Hardy secured a three-picture deal and poured his time, talents and body into this saga about a man named Eddie Brock who is possessed by an alien parasite known as Venom , stealing their bodies and ripping fangs out of them and out of their skin like a hyper-violent prairie dog. The over-the-top “Venom: The Last Dance,” written and directed by Kelly Marcel, concludes the trilogy by encapsulating everything Eddie sacrificed to merge with this impulsive, smacking goo. In the first film, Eddie was an ambitious investigative journalist from San Francisco with a fiancée played by Michelle Williams; Here he is a dirty drifter of a Mexican tamer who has lost his career, his wife and his reputation. Forced to go on the run to avoid murder charges, Eddie jokes that he can't even hold on to a pair of shoes.

At first glance, this is a drama about a drunk who feels unbearably lonely despite being bonded to a garrulous monster. Hardy voices both the brash Eddie and the gruff Venom, and his troubled one-man band remains the only reason to keep up with the films. Highlights here include the jerky chaos Eddie/Venom wreaks while mixing a michelada while grooving to “Tequila,” and the moment where he gets sucked into the fuselage of a plane like a Garfield plush toy and sighs: “It's so uncomfortably cold.” ” Eddie and Venom even take a trip to Las Vegas, the capital of self-destruction, and call themselves Thelma and Louise.

But these mild pleasures are overwhelmed by a barrage of underdeveloped supporting characters – Chiwetel Ejiofor as a general, Juno Temple and Clark Backo as Area 51 scientists, a hippie family led by Rhys Ifans – and a sophisticated, spider-like villain who preys on his victims Like a pursuer, woodchopper devours and, when sliced, sews its long branches back together. There's also a barely introduced major villain named Knull (Andy Serkis, the director of 2021's “Venom: Let There Be Carnage”) who only seems to exist so that the studio can bridge this finale with another future comic strip can.

Honestly, I'd rather watch Eddie and Venom argue over pizza toppings than team up for something as mundane as saving the planet. However, this film prefers the latter and the bombastic fight scenes that come with it. Marcel, her directorial debut, builds toward a strong emotional climax that's undercut by a post-credits sequence that suggests that everything our heroes just went through didn't matter at all. The mechanics of the Marvel machine must continue to run.

The film fills the time with sequences of Queen's “Don't Stop Me Now,” David Bowie's “Space Oddity” and Abba's “Dancing Queen,” as well as a tongue-in-cheek, sentimental montage of Eddie and Venom lounging over a Maroon 5 -Ballad unfolds. These spliced-together excerpts from all three films pay homage to the goofy screwball comedy that the franchise delivered in its best moments – and, more importantly, feel like a toast to the end of Hardy's contractual agreement.

Venom: The Last Dance
Rated PG-13 for action and comic splatter. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In the cinema.