Who says the rom-com is dead? Venom: The Last Dance is a slapstick, silly, oddly sweet romp about a mismatched couple on a zany road trip across the American West. It just happens that the couple is a disgruntled journalist with a rap sheet and a brain-eating alien symbiote that latched onto him, giving him an array of superpowers. It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination. Please do not take this as an endorsement or a recommendation. But it’s campy, absurd, and self-aware—a trashy, intermittently amusing movie that wants nothing more than to be trashy and amusing.
The Last Dance is the third film in the surprise-hit Venom franchise, a kinda-sorta spinoff of the Spider-Man movies based on one of the comic book character’s most popular nemeses. What makes Venom such an intriguing villain in the comics is that he doesn’t conceive of himself as a villain: Instead, he’s the “lethal protector,” a do-gooder, or rather a pair of do-gooders—man and symbiote—who just happens to share a hatred of Spider-Man.
Venom was introduced as a fairly straightforward villain character in the late 1980s, a sort of dark Spider-Man powered by resentment and rejection: The journalist, Eddie Brock, was a rival of Spider-Man’s newspaper photographer alter ego Peter Parker, and the alien symbiote had initially bonded with Parker, giving him a sleek black suit with unusual powers, before Parker fought it off, realizing it had malevolent intentions. Together, Brock and the symbiote became Venom, a slobbering, many-toothed, gooey character with delusions of heroism.
Over time, however, the character become popular enough that he was transformed into something closer to a conventional hero, or at least an antihero. First a new, more villainous symbiote character was created, in the form of the psychotic Carnage, whose murderous tendencies made Venom seem like less of a bad guy. Then other symbiote characters expanded the alien’s backstory, and more recently a sort of symbiote god named Knull was introduced to give this gang of not-so-bad symbiotes a Big Bad of their own.
The movies, however, had to start with a major disadvantage: The film franchise version of Venom didn’t really interact with Spider-Man, and he started as a protagonist rather than a tortured villain. So the movies awkwardly settled on another idea: Instead of making Venom a dark and twisted version of Spider-Man, they made him a very silly menace, almost a looney tunes character, whose main appeal is comic banter with himself.
Over the course of three films, the character’s comic attributes have become more and more pronounced, to the point where he’s become a create of almost pure camp. The previous films have sometimes struggled with tone control, wanting to portray Venom as both a comic figure and a menace; The Last Dance dispenses entirely with the menace. The comic book Venom was weird and sometimes terrifying; the movie Venom is a class clown: In the new film he waltzes. He gallops madly, oozing across the desert on a Venomized horse (please don’t make me explain this). And he generally cuts up like a comedian whenever he’s given the chance. It’s all pretty goofy, but at times it’s also kind of funny in an obnoxious, juvenile way.
There’s not much in the way of a story: In a barely coherent prologue, the symbiotic god Knull, who looks like he’s been trapped in an oozing black world made by a 1990s goth kid who just got a pirated copy of Photoshop, demands his monstrous minions release him by finding a codex. The codex turns out to be inside Venom, and can only be removed if either Brock or the symbiote dies. Knull’s minion chases the duo across the American West to a lab where scientists are studying a bunch of other symbiotes. It doesn’t make much sense, but hijinks ensue.
What keeps it alive is the affable banter between Brock and his alien other, the sheer weirdness of it all—the dance sequence, the Venom frog (again, don’t ask), the endearingly kooky lab scientist studying the other symbiote. But mostly it’s that the two characters who make up the character of Venom have something like real on-screen chemistry. Sure, it’s goopy black alien chemistry that revolves around making terrible margaritas and eating people’s heads—but it’s chemistry nonetheless. The movie’s tagline, “Til Death Do They Part,” even nods to the grotesque romance of it all. Venom: The Last Dance is a flagrantly bizarre comic book movie, not good in any conventional sense, but at least willing to be outrageously bad.
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