2018 Poison is wacky and often boring, but the gap between the film’s standard superhero brawler script and Tom Hardy’s “What if I got into the lobster tank?“Improvisations in the two lead roles of reporter Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote give the final product an undeniable appeal. PoisonDespite everything, it’s strange and funny in a way that few superhero films can get anymore.
Unfortunately the sequel is 2021 Venom: Let There Be Carnagerejects the tension between impulsive performance and rule-following action and leans into Hardy’s performance as a comedy, with mixed results. And now the supposedly last part (at least that’s the title). Poison: That Sweep awaysuggests) opens its toothy alien jaws and tries to breathe in an Eddie/symbiote ranch comedy road trip and a dead-serious, high-stakes ensemble sci-fi action film at the same time.
Following on from the events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage (as well as a credits scene Spider-Man: No Way Home), The Last Dance begins with Eddie (Hardy) and the Venom symbiote (also Hardy) vacationing in Mexico, where they learn that they are wanted for the murder of Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham). Mulligan was seemingly killed by Carnage’s fiancée Shriek in the final film, but he survived due to symbiote synthesis. Eddie and the symbiote decide to go to New York because Eddie is still an investigative journalist with considerable success Sweep away doesn’t do much to remind viewers of this – he remembers that he failed a judge there and can use that as blackmail to clear his name. Yes, sure, absolutely, I think.
Shortly afterwards they realize that they are being hunted by even more powerful forces. As an opening montage and some lore dumps explain, Knull (Andy Serkis), the god of symbiotes and the void who looks like the lead guitarist of a goth band, wants Eddie and the symbiote’s “code.” It’s a bit metaphysical what they possess, because essentially their host-symbiont bond is uniquely strong. Knull needs the Codex to open his space prison so he can destroy all life in the universe. So he sent a cadre of hunter-killer monsters to Earth to get them.
This Knull stuff seems to come out of nowhere in this series, and that’s because it’s a hot-off-the-presses Marvel Comics continuity that was released at virtually the same time as 2018 Poison came to cinemas. Sweep away takes Knull’s character design and backstory, as well as the concept of codes and the idea that the symbiote’s homeworld is a prison, from the work of writer Donny Cates and artist Ryan Stegman, who created Knull as the main antagonist of their hugely popular 2018 series An Poisonwhich culminated in the King in Black Crossover event.
Hardy and Sweep away Director/co-writer Kelly Marcel even uses lines from Knull’s origin story reveal issue as mic-drop moments in which a character impressively hisses: “The darkness has teeth.” Which would be a lot more fun if Cates and Stegman hadn’t been left in the dark about whether their work should be adapted Sweep away — They found this out from a trailer. That’s what they seem to be take it in stepbut things are looking anything but good for Sony and Marvel Entertainment.
Anyway: God of the symbiotes. Requires Venom’s Codex. CG hunter monsters from space. (Xenophages, a borrowed monster from Larry Hamas 1996 Venom: The Hunted.) Did you understand all of that? Because we haven’t even met the rest of the Expansives yet human Cast of Sweep awaywho come with their own backstories, goals, and personality traits. Juno Temple plays a symbiotic scientist with a sad childhood. She argues with Chiwetel Ejiofor’s xenophobic general, who wants to stop her research and eliminate her many captured alien symbiotes. Rhys Ifans plays an anachronistic, aging hippie father whose lifelong dream is to meet an alien.
The idea of expanding the cast for Sweep away It’s noble enough to include interests outside of Venom. Much has been written about how Sam Raimi’s commitment to incorporating the “little people” of New York City into his Spider-Man trilogy gave these films a crucial humanizing tone. Modern connected superhero movies typically only have time for superheroes (or characters who become superheroes at some point in the next franchise installments), and that’s almost always to the detriment of these films.
But Venom: The Last Dance is so buried beneath its moving parts that, despite Marcel’s best efforts, it cannot do justice to any of them. (She makes her directorial debut here after working as a screenwriter on the previous two “Venom” films 50 shades of gray.) The Last Dance doesn’t exactly vacillate between Venom’s no-good, very-bad road trip and the rest of the characters’ road trip: it bounces along its tracks like a runaway train, cutting straight from a serious moment of a woman reflecting on a long-held childhood grief to a dance interlude ABBA’s “Dancing Queen”. It’s like Eddie and Venom are there the Hangoverbut everyone else is in the very serious parts of Independence Day.
Even Sweep awayThe portrayal of Eddie and the relationship between the symbiote is unconvincing this time. Related to Sweep away On its own, it’s clearly unclear why Eddie would happily share his body with this alien parasite, which poses a real problem for the film’s intended emotional core. Venom here isn’t two characters in a messy but serious relationship working toward a common goal (at least not beyond “survival”). Eddie is a man whose body is controlled by the whims of a toddler asshole you can’t reason with. That is, until the exact moment Sweep awayThe climax requires the symbiote to actually be a character and not a series of jokes, after which it simply transforms into a completely different person.
Image: Sony Pictures
The original Poison succeeded in the chaos of Hardy’s courageous performance, pushing against such mundane stakes as Eddie interacting with his ex and her aggressively normal new boyfriend after they watched him feverishly climb into a restaurant’s lobster tank. Sweep awaybut removes every human consideration from the equation of Eddie’s life – every social bond, every personal goal, every stake smaller than “aliens and the government are trying to kill us.”
So when Sweep away tries to recreate the hilarious moment in the lobster tank – when the symbiote attracts attention by making Eddie behave erratically in a Las Vegas casino, nearly killing him on a wild Venom-horse hybrid ride, or one throws away a full plate of home-cooked food in front of the people who gave it to Eddie in an act of unexpected kindness – there is no response. If Eddie Brock climbs into a lobster tank but no one to care for him is there to hear it, does it make a sound? The ways in which the symbiote can embarrass Eddie are apparently endless, but as long as Eddie has no meaningful connection with anyone in the film – as long as he has lost everything but Venom and no longer cares about or cares about the esteem of others Maintaining them makes a normal life, this embarrassment is meaningless.
At this point you just put Tom Hardy in a lobster tank to put Tom Hardy in a lobster tank. And it turns out that gets old pretty quickly.
