Venom: The Last Dance

The Venom series comes to a merciful close with this thoroughly abhorrent entry, with the aggressively thin narrative following Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock as he and the title symbiote must battle a fearsome villain named Knull (Andy Serkis). Filmmaker Kelly Marcel, armed with her own screenplay, opens Venom: The Last Dance with a disastrously-underwhelming outer-space-set sequence that couldn’t possibly be less compelling (or more baffling), and it’s consequently not surprising to note that the picture, beyond that point, progresses into a mostly intolerable midsection that consists of one ill-advised, tiresome set-piece after another – with the arms-length atmosphere perpetuated and heightened by a continuing emphasis on the hopelessly tedious banter between Eddie and Venom (ie it’s just so pointless and stupid). And while the picture admittedly contains a very small handful of agreeable elements (eg a sequence wherein Eddie and Venom attack several dog abusers), Venom: The Last Dance builds towards a special-effects-heavy and absolutely interminable climax that’s as meaningless as it is endless – which, when coupled with a laughably ineffective conclusion, ultimately confirms the movie’s place as a pervasively objectionable comic-book adaptation that ranks among the worst offered by the notoriously lackluster genre.

1/2* out of ****