Venom: The Last Dance

15 | ★★✩✩✩

There are some franchises where watching for signs that the star is counting the seconds to the end of their contract is half the fun. We looked for jadedness in Daniel Craig’s final flourish as 007, didn’t we? And have you ever wondered if Vanessa Kirby, who I have seen make Chekhov feel like a new discovery, is fully invested as Mission Impossible’s thinking masochist’s femme fatale White Widow, a role that was fun at the beginning but which one imagines now feels like a squandering of precious talent the more time she spends there. A bit like being in Vegas for too long.

Ergo, is it possible that Tom Hardy can feel anything other than glad that his three-deal Marvel contract for Venom is over?

He was first seen in the franchise as the heavily New York-accented journalist Eddie Brock before Marvel’s most dentally well-endowed anti-hero Venom invaded his body. Now Eddie is a drifter, a stumbling Venom-addicted vagrant who is no longer the high-functioning human he used to be.

As a parasite/host double act, the film promised a psychologically rich exploration of Jekyll and Hyde-like duality. But the screenplays, the most recent of which credits Hardy himself as co-writer alongside director Kelly Marcel, were never up to that challenge. Nor did they do justice to the Hardy charisma which can even make world weary the most mesmerising of human conditions.

This final chapter sees Venom and his ilk turn out to be do-gooders. The ilk are other “symbiotes” (oleaginous aliens) held in captivity at a lab run by the obsessed Dr Teddy Paine (Juno Temple) in a place called Area 55, which is just a patch of desert away from the more famously secret Area 51.

Sure they bite the heads of humans as if they are sticks of celery, but symbiotes are an incredibly discerning bunch these days. They and the humans who hunt them, such as Chiwetel Ejiofor’s special ops officer, have more than each other to worry about. A dark force called Knull from “beyond the universe” is intent on destroying everything everywhere and has sent a reptilian monster that consumes its prey like a tree-shredder to hunt Venom and Brock. This is because buried in the their combined bodies is a “codex” – Marvel-speak for “thingy” – which will unlock the dark force from its prison.

The resulting chaotic, pleasingly violent showdown in which aliens and humans join forces to take on this new level of evil does not disappoint. But the dialogue does. Hardy is given – or has given himself – lines which are criminally off the shelf.

The low bar is set when after chomping the heads off a gang of Mexican dog-nappers (that most morally moribund of career paths) Venom, who is voiced by Hardy, quips: “You take me to all the best places.” True, there is a better line during the duo’s road trip when Rhys Ifans’s hippy throwback introduces Brock to his children Echo and Leaf and Venom says of the offspring, in a way that only Eddie can hear, “a life in therapy”. But no. Normal service is soon resumed when Venom throws some shapes while dancing to Abba’s Dancing Queen in a Vegas hotel room and Eddie says, “I cannot unsee that.”

This is a line that has been out there for so long any self-respecting screenwriter would reject it.

It wouldn’t matter if comedy was not such an essential part of the Marvel menu. In the latest Dead Pool it was the zingers that gave the impression there was life in the Marvel universe yet.

Here the script merely confirms its continuing decline.