Venom: The Last Dance is a delight when it’s not being a Madame Web rerun

It’s a testament to Tom Hardy and writer-director Kelly Marcel that the process of having to bid adieu to the veiny, intrusive-thought-made-hulking-flesh that is Venom may bring the whisper of a tear to the eye. Venom: The Last Dance is, supposedly, the third and final outing for the classic Spider-Man adversary who, for contractual reasons, has not been allowed to fight any Spider-Men.

The Venom trilogy has partly been Sony’s Eminem-soundtracked, oddly vintage attempt to offer a clapback to MCU wholesomeness. Yet, thanks largely to Let There Be Carnage, the trilogy’s 2021 middle chapter, it’s also transformed into a feverishly inspired romcom between Hardy’s moto-jacketed journalist Eddie Brock and Venom, the alien symbiote who latched onto him.

The Last Dance, though, sees the franchise unfortunately relapse somewhat into the Morbius and Madame Web brand of dense, dull exposition that Sony’s non-Spider-Man movies seem drawn towards like a moth to a flame. Knull (voiced by Andy Serkis), the “god of the void” and Venom’s creator, whose appearance is of the interchangeable, skeletal wraith variety, is on the hunt for a codex that will free him from his prison and allow him to get back on schedule for destroying the universe.

We’re subsequently introduced to more symbiotes, all helpfully colour-coded, and Knull’s squad of symbiote hunters, the xenophages, a generic alien foe save for a quite cool feature that sees them spray a blood mist out the back of their heads every time they chow down on someone. Two accomplished actors, Ted Lasso’s Juno Temple and Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor, play a scientist and a soldier, respectively – jobs that largely involve peering through observation windows and attempting to fathom the unfathomable.

But Marcel, who’s now added director to her usual screenwriter credit, is well aware of what her film is. Any non-Venom scene flies by like it’s being watched from a passing rollercoaster while, crawling out from underneath the pile of studio demands, appears a tribute to Hardy’s blissfully untethered performance as both host and guttural-voiced parasite. What started as the actor dunking his entire body into a restaurant lobster tank here ends with him hunched over a Vegas slot machine, slamming buttons and pulling cranks as if he were being puppeteered off camera.

Any scene in The Last Dance that concerns Venom and Eddie is a delight, a direct continuation of the series’s charming, broad-purpose metaphor – queer-coded in parts (they refer to each other as Thelma and Louise), and all about self-love and acceptance. Together, they break up a dog fighting ring and ensure the pups all find “loving forever homes”, a particularly Hardy touch considering his offscreen canine advocacy.

They join up with an alien-obsessed camper van family headed by Rhys Ifans, and get roped into a sing-along to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”. Venom, at one point, fuses himself with a horse, hooves throwing up dust and tongue flapping gracefully wind. There’s even some unexpected sincerity when Venom tells Eddie, “You would make a good dad.”

It’s enough to justify both the film’s tongue-in-cheek nod to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam and its end-game highlights reel of Venom and Eddie’s best moments. It’s hard to say how these films will be remembered in the grand scheme of comic book history, but, with The Last Dance, we can at least be reminded that sometimes they actually managed to have fun with these things.

Dir: Kelly Marcel. Starring: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach, Stephen Graham. 15, 110 mins.

‘Venom: The Last Dance’ is in cinemas from Friday 25 October