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. 

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

Just as much of a 90s throwback as its predecessor, Venom: Let There Be Carnage presents like an out-of-time Summer blockbuster; a Spawn adjacent till-ringer that, similarly, interprets the glistening musculature of these comic book anti-heroes as a knotted web of computer generated effects. Let There Be Carnage is the kind of film that used to come to market pre-packaged - for maximum teenage brain-share - with a soundtrack CD that boasted of music not just from the motion picture, but inspired by it as well. Something of a lost art in this day and age. That's not to say Sony hasn't made any effort with the musical suite of their Marvel spin-off. This sequel's credits are packed with undercooked genre fusions that grimly intone our hero's name, as if summoning the oily symbiote back to the screen for a brain-gnashing encore. 

Director Andy Serkis, who most recently delivered a Netflix adaptation of The Jungle Book - entitled Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle - that skewed far closer to Rudyard Kipling's poems and short stories than any of Disney's treacly efforts, keeps this sequel refreshingly brief. Where other superhero tentpoles dare to reckon with biblical runtimes, Let There Be Carnage wraps up in under a hundred minutes. In an inspired twist on the usual identity splitting, Kelly Marcel's screenplay is constructed with the bashful mechanics of a romantic comedy. Tom Hardy's Eddie Brock and the eponymous sludge monster he has bonded with fall out of then back into love, the latter even experimenting with a series of short-lived trysts that (repeatedly) fail to bring the creature comfort. Although not as gruesome as the title suggests - Woody Harrelson's alien costume preferring to generate sinewy whips over the scythes and axe heads seen on paper - Let There Be Carnage does still feature subsurface scattered tentacles forcing themselves down victim's throats. A note of bloodless violence that, as with the film's prequel, sharply recalls the more sordid aspects of Japanese animation. 

Venom

Despite their critical and financial success, Sony's first Spider-Man spin-off doesn't actually attempt to follow either the tone or the scope of the company's recent collaborations with Marvel. Refreshingly free of aggressive, multi-tiered world building, Ruben Fleischer's Venom instead resembles the kind of superhero feature made back in the late 1990s; those three-act mutants that passed for comic book adaptations before Blade hit and showed everyone how to really do it. Venom recalls a time when comic book branding was less important than whichever star actor you could attract to a project. In that respect, Tom Hardy's casting here reaches for a kind of reassurance and bankability that is almost entirely absent from modern superhero fare.

Venom then is best enjoyed as a throwback, a comic book film that sees its titular property as a jumping off point (one that can be steered towards exciting motorbike stunts) rather than a conceptual millstone. A routine piece of filmmaking then, but one built in ways that we are no longer accustomed to. Hardy, up front, gives the kind of twitchy, physical performance that's closer to a larger-than-life, Schumacher-era Batman villain than the earnest enthusiasm displayed by Tom Holland's web-head. Although likely completely unintentional, it's also interesting to note a few similarities between Venom and Hiroshi Watanbe's 1986 OVA, Guyver: Out of Control. Both revolve around an alien bio-armour that invades every level of a person's experience, wrapping their fracturing body in a black sludge that takes an invasive (and basically sexual) interest in its host. Conflict in Fleischer and Watanabe's features also revolve around a similar kind of corporate clash: a big business expert submits themselves to a colder, crueler creature on their way to a showdown with a discombobulated amateur.

Mad Max: Fury Road

In Mad Max: Fury Road the title role slips a little further into the mythic. George Miller and co-writers Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris deliberately posit a situation that doesn't quite align with the previous Max Rockatansky stories. Tom Hardy's take hears voices. He's haunted by visions of a woman, an Aboriginal man, and a child who calls him by his first name. Max hasn't just failed a family (his?), he's failed a community. Mel Gibson's Max wandered out into the wasteland to find something big enough to kill him. Hardy's Max seeks escape. This Max is out of time, the factions and systems he brushes up against are well-established to the point of enjoying several distinct industries. This isn't the day after, this is decades. A generation. The Smegma Crazies have settled into a corner and started breeding. Hugh Keays-Byrne's Immortan Joe is the convoy Khan, a diseased, barrel-chested Daddy who's willing to risk everything he's made just so he can hold a perfect son. His Citadel is awash with water and greenery but his humans, his property, are still born with lumps and irradiated half-lives.

In Joe's world healthy women are fashion shoot chattel to be hoarded in bank vaults. Joe's wives flee after collectively deciding that they don't want to raise warlord juniors. Men are surplus to requirement, Joe's doing all the fathering so their shaved heads are filled up with white line fatalism, McCarthy's Skin kids swept up in a Freakwave. God is the all-powerful V8, a burning chromed skull that sits under a divine light hoarding fetishised steering wheels. These War Boys spray paint their teeth, hoping to emulate this deity on their way to the great pile-up in the sky. The Radback teems with enemies to all, scattered gangs with graphic identities, their prevailing aesthetics weird off-shots of Joe's roughly hewn hot rods. The most striking are The Buzzards, a gang of shrivelled up sand people encased in vehicles that look like the Monster Minds from Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors as dressed by Peter Weir's The Cars That Ate Paris. Each machine is a mess of rusty bayonets, pregnant with tetanus, outfitted with grasping mechanical arms and circular saws.

Despite all this progress, Max hasn't aged. He's a raggedy man frozen in his defining moment. This free-wheeling approach to continuity recalls Akira Kurosawa's two bodyguard films, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. Each film taking place in a completely different time period, the spectral, problem solving hero the only constant. There's also a touch of Seiji Miyaguchi's super swordsman from Seven Samurai in how Max casually tackles a pursuing tank. 007's in the mix as well - like Hardy, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan all cracked skulls for decades while nursing a vague, sense memory of George Lazenby's departed wife. Since this is a reintroduction Max has to develop and change. He begins his adventure in bondage, an O-neg commodity, muzzled and manacled so he can be slowly drained to prolong Nicholas Hoult's flagging War Boy, Nux. When Max joins the freedom convoy he's violent and irritable. Max is the nervous energy in Fury Road, it falls to Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa to provide a sense of stability. 

She's Aliens' Ellen Ripley come again - quiet, capable and utterly commanding. If anything, Max is trying to impress her. Theron has priors with this kind of role. Her Meredith Vickers in Prometheus was also essentially the same kind of character as Ripley was in Alien. Unfortunately Ridley Scott's newer film chose to interpret Vickers' by-the-book pragmatism as the behaviour of a spoilsport. In Fury Road Theron's allowed to sing. She drives the rig, she calls the shots. Rather than jostle for the lead Max slots into a similar role as Michael Biehn's Hicks, a comfortable component, happy to assist. Eventually their relationship transcends language entirely, both parties able to scramble around the tanker, assured that their ally is doing exactly what needs to be done. Their actions are ultimately interchangeable.

George Miller and cinematographer John Seale approach action laser focused on clarity. The frame is stable, often dreamlike in how it hovers around the conflict. Moments are expressed clearly and concisely, you never feel like editor Margaret Sixel is having to engineer excitement. Everything you need to know is communicated in an image or a sound. Since the entire film is a never-ending chase we spend a lot of that time watching fragile, barely clothed humans climbing all over speeding, filthy machinery. It's the thrill of watching Peter Kent casually hop from a pickup to a big rig in Terminator 2: Judgment Day exploded to feature length. During Dredd's original theatrical release Alex Garland spoke about a sequel that would adapt Pat Mills, Mike McMahon and Brian Bolland's The Cursed Earth storyline. After that film tanked it seemed unlikely that we'd see a film about a highly motivated cop leading a ragtag group across an unyielding desert, pursued by radioactive mutants. As it turns out, George Miller has delivered the best possible version of that premise. Fury Road is an overcranked treat full of white impact frames and distant carrion squawks that's exactly as excellent as your memory of Mad Max 2.