Venom: The Last Dance (2024)

There is a moment in Venom: The Last Dance when a family of alien-enthusiast hippies drives a van through the Nevada desert, and the film briefly remembers that it is a comedy. Mostly it is a trilogy-closer, and it closes the trilogy the way these things close: symbiotes, acid tanks, a farewell at the Statue of Liberty. Kelly Marcel, making her directorial debut after writing the previous two entries, keeps the machinery running. Tom Hardy remains committed to a performance built on biting people and then apologizing for it. The result is loud, amiable, and structurally exhausted, a picture that knows precisely what it is and declines to reach for anything else.

The cast is multiracial and unbothered about it. Chiwetel Ejiofor commands the Area 51 operation, Juno Temple and Clark Backo play scientists with competence and screen time, and Peggy Lu returns as Mrs. Chen. None of this is announced, argued, or framed as a statement. Race goes unmentioned. Gender goes unmentioned. The film has a woman director and two women in lab coats, and it treats both facts as ordinary, which is either progress or simply casting. The paralyzed left arm given to Temple's character is backstory, not a platform.

On the question of sermonizing, the film is close to silent. There is no climate allegory, no indictment of the military apparatus it spends two hours depicting, no lesson about bodies or brains or history. It is a corporate product about a corporate product, and it has no interest in biting the hand that feeds. What remains is spectacle, and the spectacle is adequate. The last dance is not a lecture. It is a farewell tour, and farewell tours are seldom asked to mean anything.