What seems to be the next to last from Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters, Venom 3 the Last Dance is a bittersweet bookend to the Superhero comedy series.
The basic premise of Last Dance revolves around Eddie Brock and his BFF symbiote being pursued by Imperium led by Rex Strickland and worse, the Xenophage unleashed by a mysterious entity Knull who is the creator of the symobites. Why, Venom? Because he is the only one who has this “matrix of leadership” called the codex.
The sequel written by Tom Hardy despite a few flaws and your usual caveats, serves as a love letter or at least a tribute with Venom going on this journey which began from being transported back to his universe. As in, "the sonyverse”.
Brock learns that he is considered a suspect for the murder of NYPD officer Patrick Mulligan. He stumbles into some underground criminals within a Dog fighting circuit kennel, and dispatches them, which is always a good thing because animal cruelty is wrong.
So is denying health insurance to clients who already paid into it, but I digress.
To balance out the comedy, there's this unfortunate incident where Brock is forced to kill one of the Imperium soldiers, and I felt that it was a throwaway arc as not much came from it other than Eddie feeling a brief moment of remorse.
The movie gets its legs during the beginning but stumbles around the 2nd act. The humor at times is self-referential and even joked about the Multiverse and Tom Cruise,
but sometimes the comedic scenarios overstayed their welcome especially when Brock meets up with this hippie family in search of Alien lifeforms in Las Vegas where the now decommissioned Area 51 is located which sets the stage for the final showdown between the Xenophage and the captured symbiotes who might as well be called the S-Men because Sony would rather focus on trying to establish spinoff characters than cameos from a certain iconic Wall crawler.
There are a few predictable outcomes, including a ‘boss fight” that bears familiarity to those resident evil games of old. However, the ending was cathartic enough to put the rubber stamp on this franchise and then comes these unnecessary mid credits stingers.
Since the story is conclusive, well at least as far as Sony is concerned, these scenes should've been left on the chopping room floor.
Not gonna lie, I really liked the comedic approach to this series because it didn't take itself too seriously and in some ways, the Venom films were not only better than the other Sony's SPUMC films, ( no shit) but also some of Marvel Studio's previous efforts looking at you Phase four. And this was due to the chemistry between Brock and the symbiote, who is more than some one-dimensional archetype, he has a lust for life and is livelier than his brooding host for the most part.
While The Last Dance may not be the swan song we preferred, it’s certainly not bird shit, but instead the best send-off to Sony’s series of intellectual property based films which overstayed its welcome.
