For a third installment, Venom: The Last Dance brings back Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock, a hard-hitting journalist whose life is a bizarre Jekyll-and-Hyde double act. He shares his body with Venom, an alien symbiote voiced in a gruff, comically aggressive tone by Hardy himself. While Marvel often cloaks its heroes with powers, Eddie’s situation is more complex and messier: Venom sometimes takes over entirely, sometimes lets a tentacle slip, and frequently adds dark humor to Eddie’s mental monologue.
Hardy’s portrayal of the dysfunctional duo has consistently been the best part of these films, adding a bizarre yet oddly engaging buddy-comedy element to an otherwise chaotic production. However, in The Last Dance, which opens Thursday, the core tension isn’t just Eddie and Venom’s personality split—it’s Hardy’s skillful, comedic performance against an overwhelming CGI backdrop that dilutes any charm.
In the director’s chair this time is Kelly Marcel, who previously co-wrote the series and now takes over from Andy Serkis and Ruben Fleischer. The plot transports Eddie and Venom to Mexico, where they’re hiding from the law but face a new threat. Enter Knull (voiced by Serkis), a sinister creator of the symbiotes, who sends a force to capture Venom’s “codex” for a galactic showdown that risks total annihilation of humans and symbiotes alike.
The best moments in the previous Venom films leaned into low-stakes, quirky humor—think Venom craving lobster or ordering pizza. But this time around, Marcel seems to pull the film into a typical Marvel territory: massive stakes, villainous labs, and alien threats. The movie opens with an uninspired, Area 51-style setting, where Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple) and military leader Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) study trapped symbiotes, attempting to fend off alien invaders seeking the codex. When Venom’s showdown with the extraterrestrial enemies finally unfolds, it promises, as the title hints, to split Eddie and Venom forever.
The series has always felt like a B-movie alternative to the Marvel universe, charming precisely because it doesn’t reach for nobility or ponderous backstory. The fun was in its dark comedy, where Eddie and Venom’s daily antics could echo a twisted version of The Odd Couple. Sadly, The Last Dance strays far from these strengths, piling on CGI-heavy scenes and standard action plots instead of focusing on Hardy’s hilarious double act.
At one point, Hardy’s Eddie tries running through a desert while Venom, his internal alien, yells commands like “Engage your core!” and “Nice horsey!” The funniest lines in The Last Dance come from this inner voice, which brings humor and personality that the overdone action scenes fail to deliver. A cameo from a UFO-loving family in a VW bus (headed by Rhys Ifans) only adds to the disjointed feel, mixing slapstick and doomsday in ways that make the movie feel like a genre clash.
As the film teeters between action thriller and comedy, it’s clear what’s missing: Venom’s chaotic, relatable quirks. Eddie is a journalist, after all; why not show him tackling daily life with his alien co-host? “Imagine the debates we’d have over Oxford commas,” Venom might say in a reflection of the small-stakes charm that made the earlier films memorable.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences, violent action, and some bloodshed, Venom: The Last Dance runs for 110 minutes, but despite Hardy’s best efforts, it ultimately feels like the franchise missed an opportunity to embrace the comic dynamic that could have been its unique strength. For a “swan song” that leans more into spectacle than humor, it’s a mixed farewell to a franchise that never fully realized its own potential.
Rating: 2 out of 4 stars
Paraluman P. Funtanilla
Paraluman P. Funtanilla is Tutubi News Magazine's Marketing Specialist and is a Contributing Editor. She finished her degree in Communication Arts in De La Salle Lipa. She has worked as a Digital Marketer for start-up businesses and small business spaces for the past two years. She has earned certificates from Coursera on Brand Management: Aligning Business Brand and Behavior and Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content. She also worked with Asia Express Romania TV Show.
