Venom The Last Dance movie review: Tom Hardy’s Venom bows out in style

Codex is created when there is a meshing of the core of a symbiote (as aliens are called in this series) with its host. This happens when the host dies and is revived by the symbiote, and it can only be snuffed out when one of them dies.

So we have a film where a really nasty-looking Xenophage basically keeps hunting down Eddie (Hardy), since he is the host who has bonded beautifully with his symbiote a.k.a Venom – thus carrying Codex within him.

They do buddy things like talking and joking and sharing their likes/dislikes – even if one buddy is a creature growing out of another’s body – in the film’s quieter moments. But of these, there are very few. 

One of them involves the kind of hippie family that apparently still exists, driving down in a broken-down van towards Area 51, to catch some aliens before that famed outpost is officially decommissioned. The fact that the father is played by Rhys Ifans as Rhys Ifans, is enough cause to wonder where the film is going with this. But writer-director Marcel (she co-wrote the earlier two Venom films) actually goes further, and manages to create some genuine moments of pathos and what-could-have-been here as Eddie looks out through the window at a desolate landscape at dusk.

There is a Las Vegas dance that also belongs to another, better film, as well as the gross misuse of Temple and Ejiofor as the quintessential idealistic scientist and brave soldier, respectively. Worse, Temple must share credit with another woman scientist, who mostly just blankly watches aliens in test tubes, with her standout feature being that she wears a Christmas tree pin.

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But then comes the end and, miraculously, after all the mess that Venom the film has been – not counting that Venom the creature is some sort of black goo itself – Marcel choreographs the clash of what are ultimately giant, ungainly tentacles and long, scaly tongues with some finesse. 

She also manages to evoke a sense of fleeting loss, which is not as easy as it seems in a film of this nature. 

Venom: The Last Dance movie director: Kelly Marcel
Venom: The Last Dance movie cast: Tom Hardy, Juno Temple, Stephen Graham, Rhys Ifans, Chiwetel Ejiofor
Venom: The Last Dance movie rating: 2.5 stars