The Venom film series is one of the strangest phenomena to emerge from the superhero movie boom. Based on the popular Spider-Man villain-turned-anti-hero, the Venom films tear up the Marvel Studios playbook and take an early 2000s approach to superhero cinema, stripping their source material to its most basic ingredients and isolating them from the context of their franchise. book universe. Their relatively small scale and total lack of pretension make them a change of pace from their cousins ​​from DC or Marvel themselves, but while that’s theoretically refreshing, the resulting films aren’t actually any better, and Venom: The Last Dance is no exception. True to form for this trilogy – which probably ends here – the mindless and disjointed The last dance skate past on the star Tom Hardys charm and some good gags.

Hardy returns as Eddie Brock, a disgraced investigative journalist whose body hosts a shady alien life form called Venom (also Hardy, doing a goofy voice). After the events of the 2021 century Venom: Let there be carnage and their pointless cameo in Spider-Man: No Way HomeEddie and Venom find themselves both being hunted by a secret army black ops team led by Mac Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and of a beastly predecessor to Venom’s own creator, Knull (voiced by Andy Serkis). While on the run, they engage in a clumsy mix of high-speed action and light hijinx that’s never as exciting, funny, or heartfelt as it should be.

Venom: The Last Dance racing through action and exposition at breakneck speed. The story does not build; things simply happenone by one, without expectation or excitement. Each action is immediately followed by its most obvious consequence without regard to the pace of the story, never mind the literal geography between the parties involved. What happens is sometimes funny or striking on a design level; If you’re excited to see Venom fuse with a bunch of different animals or do an inexplicably choreographed dance number with recurring supporting character Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), you’re in luck. There’s a manic energy to some of the Venom business that evokes Jim Carrey The mask. But for all the GIF-able moments the film provides, there’s no particular flavor or feel to how the writer and debutant director Kelly Marcel presents some of it. It’s a relentless marathon of mediocrity.

This ruthless quasi-efficiency applies to characters as much as action. For example: The background for The Temple of JunoThe character, Dr. Payne, is delivered via a flashback that is so short and so corny that it has no effect other than delivering the information therein. Each character is given exactly one specific quirk or detail meant to endear them to the audience but is then given no further depth or development.

The only supporting player who gets any significant screen time is Martin, a friendly UFO-obsessed hippie played by Rhys Ifanswho picks up hitchhiker Eddie on his way to Area 51. This is the only point where the film slows down, as Eddie (with Venom hidden in his body) basks in the wholesome glow of Martin’s family and meditates on the nature of life, death, purpose and belonging. These themes should resonate with the rest of the story, but none of it lands because nothing outside of Martin’s van feels remotely real.

To his credit, Tom Hardy puts a lot into his performance, so much so that it seems like he’s in a completely different movie. His venom is as broad and goofy as ever, though he spends most of the film as a disembodied voice commenting on the events of the film. Eddie, on the other hand, actually feels like more than a bad New York accent for a change. Without much dialogue about this, Hardy plays Eddie as a man destroyed by the events of the last two films and forced to ride shotgun in his own body and his own life. He is on an inner journey that is more interesting than anything that actually happens in the film. Hardy is the only player who adds to the sense of gravitas, sincerity and finality The last dance seems to strive for. Marcel and company even take a turn for the bare sentimentality of Paul Walker’s cinematic wake from Furious 7and for one million reasonsit’s a total fragrance.

The Married movies have been the only remotely successful branch of Sony’s disastrous shared universe of Spider-Man characters other than Spider-Man, so it’s no surprise that, despite Tom Hardy being provided with an off-ramp from the franchise, The last dance dangling a few threads for a potential follow up. While most of these sequels are too trivial to detract from this film in any meaningful way, one of them leaves The last dance feels more like a middle chapter than the conclusion of a trilogy. And yet there’s so little promise in what’s left when the credits roll that it’s hard to imagine anyone clambering to see the next one. For a trilogy that usually avoids the specific pitfalls of Marvel’s eternity machine, it’s a disappointing and disappointing finale.