Venom: The Last Dance is not a good movie. If you want to stop there, I won’t blame you.
However, the third Venom movie was decently fun if you’ve ever liked anything about the first two. I didn’t hate the first one, and I soured a little on the second (because Carnage should have been so much more), so I figured I had to see it through. After Madame Web, I am out on everything else in the Sony Spider-Man Universe (that doesn’t have Spider-Man in it).
If you have liked anything about the first two – go see this one. It has it’s fun moments, and the banter between Eddie and Venom is decent and sometimes makes you chuckle. There are a lot of wasted characters in this one because basically everyone outside of Stephen Graham from the first two wanted nothing to do with this one.
You have multiple MCU actors appear here – Chiwetel Ejiofor (Mordo), Rhys Ifans (Lizard), Andy Serkis (Ulysses Klaue) – but none of them are worth remembering from this film. There is wasted potential with Knull (which is just Andy Serkis talking like Snoke) and terrible CGI that looks worse than a Playstation 2 game when he finally shows his face. However, they do stick to the whole “we went to the MCU for five minutes” storyline like they did in the No Way Home post-credits scene, and the movie starts by showing that scene (so you at least get a Thanos mention in the SSU), but then doesn’t pay it off.
The peak of stupid in the movie was when Venom does a full dance number to an ABBA song with Mrs. Chen who he randomly just happens to run into at the Paris casino in Las Vegas (remember, she’s just a convenience store owner in San Francisco, now she’s a high roller in Las Vegas at the time that Eddie just happens to stroll through). It wasn’t the funny kind of stupid, it was the “we tried to make it funny stupid but failed miserably and it was just eye rolling stupid”.
Yeah, yeah, I know…stop thinking too much about it.
There isn’t much to the story, but I don’t want to spoil too many things. The final fight has it’s moments and we see other symbiotes (which is in the trailer, so no spoiler there), but I hated the way it ended. And there is a very undeserved send off to the trilogy when none of these SSU films have ever earned anything.
The Bottom Line
Was Venom 3 good? No
Was Venom 3 kinda fun? Yes
Will it be the best Sony Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man this year? Also yes, but that’s not saying much
It had it’s moments, but it didn’t deserve it’s ending. The only thing it deserved was to be a tax write-off for Sony. If you even remotely liked either of the first two though, then it’s probably worth seeing.
Madame Web was garbage. Kraven is going to be garbage. This…was a movie.
Final Score – 2/5
Check out my full Letterboxd ratings for the year!
