Eddie and Venom - and the film that they are in - have been known to thrive on chaos. They are at their best when the alarm bells ring the loudest and they have no options left but to go all out. There was no dearth of that in Let There Be Carnage, the second film of the Tom Hardy Venom trilogy.
The third and final entry does not quite pull out the stops. Eddie and Venom aren't allowed a free run of the field. The result is a perfunctory, low-yield movie that lacks consistent pace and energy.
The unabashedly silly and defiantly campy flavour of Venom (2018) and the even more over-the-top 2021 sequel made the wild adventures and antics of Eddie Brock and the powerful Venom symbiote within him enjoyable in a weird, guilty-pleasure sort of way. That is not the case with Venom: The Last Dance, designed to bring the curtain down on the Eddie-Venom partnership. The send-off is anything but memorable.
Tom Hardy - the story is credited to him alongside first-time director Kelly Marcel - delivers an adequately earnest star turn. But those shoulders do droop when the burden of the heavy lifting gets out of hand. With the focus shifting away from the lead actor ever so often in the 110-minute film, the intrinsically celebratory nature of the valediction is seriously undermined, turning the exercise into a near-joyless affair.
The spark of Venom and Let There Be Carnage goes missing when it should have been at its brightest. Venom: The Last Dance is out of step with the lively spirit tha.
