Trying to describe the tonal oddity of a film like Venom: The Last Dance is about as easy as pinning down its titular slithery alien parasite. It invokes crudely violent humour one moment and a strange, sincere pathos the next, before blasting your hair back with a Cat Stevens song while the camera luxuriates in a crane shot of the Las Vegas skyline or an alien eats the heads of some Mexican dog-fighters. Even for the Marvel franchise, it’s a lot: this is basically Overstimulation: The Movie.
People who have never liked a Marvel film seem to have an unlikely (and possibly ironic) affection for the Venom films, simply because they are so ridiculous. Here, in the third and final instalment, the story picks back up in the life of former journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy, who throws himself into this faintly absurd part with the same seriousness he does every other project) and Venom, the vicious, people-eating symbiote who lives inside him. As we know from the first two instalments of the trilogy, Venom tends to appear in moments of danger, excitement, or chompy hunger – and this bizarro split-personality story has yielded two relatively enjoyable, low-stakes films which, for all the head-eating, read like strange buddy comedies.
In The Last Dance , which takes place not long after the serial killer hunt of the previous film, Eddie and Venom are being chased by a dark overlord from the alien’s home planet. The briefly glimpsed villain wants to find a hidden key to destroy .