Venom: The Last Dance Review
Venom: The Last Dance hit theaters on October 25, 2024 to the delight of fans around the world. The Venom saga has proven to be the most successful of the Sony Spiderman spinoff movies, already eclipsing movies such as 2022’s Morbius, and Madam Web, which premiered earlier this year.
Venom: The Last Dance sees protagonist Eddie Brock and his alien-symbiote buddy Venom on the run after the events of the last movie, in which he was framed for the murder of a police chief following a battle against the symbiote Carnage. The duo runs not only from a top-secret military force tasked with capturing all symbiotes but also Xenophage, a new alien sent by the symbiotes’ creator Knull to hunt down and kill all the symbiotes in hopes of finding a key that could free him from his prison in deep space.
This film retains much of the light-hearted humor of the second movie while simultaneously returning to the dark and edgy tones of the first. It did not blend as well as it could have, and there were a few parts of the movie where characters face horrible deaths in one scene followed by a scene where Venom’s strange alien logic and indifference to danger is played for laughs. The movie’s exposition felt shortened and compressed to fit more jokes into the movie. It’s a bit disorienting, and resulted in much of the movie having some pretty bumpy pacing, only picking up and feeling normal at the end.
Fortunately, that's the only part of the movie that feels off. The visuals and special effects are just as impressive as they were in the last two movies, and the humor and sound design are on point. Venom: The Last Dance’s return to a horror-focused antagonistic force was definitely the right choice, as Knull is described as an eldritch evil older than the universe itself. The Xenophage also plays the part of an unstoppable killing machine perfectly, and many of its scenes are genuinely unsettling.
Venom: The Last Dance effectively caps off the trilogy beginning with Venom in 2018, and other than its often-rocky pacing, is what audiences should expect from what has become the figurehead of Sony’s superhero universe.
