Organised chaos reigns in this last dance

At best, this third iteration, the final act in the trilogy, is a fairly deformed attempt at a serious superhero movie. It’s also pretty hard to come to terms with this current version of Venom and Eddie Brock as bromantic partners, as opposed to the savage, brutal duo from the comics. This film doesn’t do anything to make that seem natural or organic. Also, the film’s new antagonist — a silver-haired alien wizard — is Knull, so you don’t exactly have to go far looking for the void. Knull doesn’t go beyond looking creepy — he is obviously being set up as a future threat.

There are quite a few antagonists, all poorly-defined characters, lacking in compelling motivations. That makes the confrontations and potential face-offs uninteresting, to say the least.

‘The Last Dance’, the third in an unlikely trilogy of solo adventures for Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), unlike major Marvel films, prefers to set its ambitions only as high as the teenage fan. Apparently, Hardy himself collaborated on the writing with writer-turned-director Kelly Marcel, who also wrote the earlier two entries.

The script is all over the place, with multiple storylines going nowhere. Given the nature of the first two iterations, I guess that was to be expected. In fact, the most telling dialogue here would be a toss-up between Chiwetel Ejiofor’s “In my line of work, something terrible is always imminent”, and Stephen Graham’s “The darkness has teeth”.

The oft-frustrated journalist Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote Venom (bolstered by slick CGI) are pretty much confused about where they want to go from here. Brock is wandering around, aiming to reach New York — ever since he realised he was a ‘wanted’ man. Knull is supposedly stalking Eddie/Venom for something precious they happen to have. While on the run from the cops and the US military, the pair must also duck the stalking monster. Juno Temple works on the soon-to-become-redundant Area 51 site as a scientist, and then, there’s the zany foolhardy hippie dad (Rhys Ifans) thinking nothing about putting his family at risk while on an alien-spotting road trip.

Brock and Venom create chaos within, and without. When a drunk Brock wants to call it quits, Venom wants another drink. Brock even gets to do a surreal dream sequence in a casino with Mrs Cheng (Peggy Lu), an ABBA fan. Hardy plays Eddie with energy and has great comedic timing. He makes the obvious look funny.

Like its predecessors, this movie is a mess. Eddie and Venom may have come to terms with their divergent personalities, but the movie franchise doesn’t appear to have learnt that lesson. A silly escapist road trip comedy is pitted against sci-fi alien invasion schema and the result is a collision that feels ‘knullified’ and lacking in thrills. More pointedly, this series lacks Venom and the visual effects look too cheesy to curry favour. The finale tries hard to end on an emotional note with a montage, and there are a couple of post-credit sequences meant to augment the mystery of what is to come in future.

Hardy’s final tango with a symbiote has a weird tone, a formulaic half-cooked plot and is laden with banter that after a point, feels too tedious to smile about. The narrative is packed densely with action and campy humour — even so, it’s just not funny or entertaining!