Saturday, 4 January 2025
Thursday, 2 January 2025
Venom: The Last Dance
Venom: The Last Dance represents filmmaking as a rolling, observable contract negotiation. As with many other superhero sequels, although there is still money to be mined from this slime saga the most valuable parties to the property, in this case Tom Hardy and Tom Hardy doing a funny voice, have either come to the end of their original deal or are otherwise desperate to go off and do something else. As such Last Dance strains to accommodate a dishevelled and disengaged-looking lead actor, who has scored himself a story credit alongside writer-director Kelly Marcel, while erecting some sort of scaffolding that can be returned to later, should Venom 3 buck the trend of recent Sony branded Marvel sinkholes. So, somewhere in a pitch black pocket universe, the symbiote progenitor plots alongside ravenous horrors that can be instantly transmitted anywhere in space and time. Knull, as played by Andy Serkis, is a belatedly deployed Thanos figure for this drain-circling spin-off cycle that, quite apparently, was being cued up to battle the likes of Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter before their feature debuts went down in flames. Elsewhere there's Hardy's Eddie Brock who, having been rudely deposited in an alternative reality pending a cross-over event in Venom: Let There Be Carnage, finds himself just as impolitely dumped back in his original realm, having never actually teamed up with anybody. All of which is to say that Venom 3 runs in circles to put out fires started elsewhere, all while struggling to make space for Juno Temple's one-dimensional scientist and, in Hardy's Brock, a principle character who seems to be exiting their own franchise.
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