Quick Synopsis: Eddie Brock and Venom must make a devastating decision as they’re pursued by a mysterious military man and alien monsters from Venom’s home world

The Venom movies are without a doubt, the best of the not-Spider-Man Spider-Man movies. Let’s face it, that’s not a difficult hurdle to clear. Whilst the likes of Madame Web and Morbius have been absolute shit, Venom has, at worst, been incredibly frustrating. They are the epitome of wasted potential. There are moments throughout the franchise which I love. In The Last Dance (V: TLD, pronounced Vee-Told) there’s a fantastic moment where Eddie Brock/Venom is travelling with a family and the dad starts a singalong of Space Oddity. It’s hard to explain why, but it’s incredibly sweet and powerful. Usually, when you hear that song in popular culture, it’s because of an astronaut, and the message is “Look, he’s in space”. The use here is more “he’s completely alone”. It starts off funny, but the sense of isolation and despair quickly sinks in, and it’s incredibly powerful, to the point where it actually has genuine emotion.

It’s not just in the Bowie-oke where you see what V: TLD could be. The closing carnage of the multiple symbiotes is a cavalcade of chaos and fun, but it also only lasts around 15 minutes. That’s such a shame, as there’s enough for a whole movie there; the idea of different versions running around causing mayhem is exciting, especially since they all seem to have their own powers and identities.

Instead of those potential fun times, V: TLD decides it wants to spend its time with Knull, the creator of the symbiotes, who spends the film attempting to retrieve a codex from inside of Eddie/Venom so that he can be freed from prison. So the main villain in this, which has been advertised as the closing film of this trilogy (although we all know that it’s not), is locked in a prison for the entire runtime and never interacts with the characters. It is possible to have a villain like that, but they need to have that little something extra which means that even when they’re not onscreen, their presence hangs over everything. That never happens, the creatures he sends out are scary, but he has no presence. In fact, it could be argued that using the Xenophage lessens his impact because they’re so deadly and hard to kill, it means that THEY are the narrative beast to defeat, not the Big Boss. Ironically, this means the impact that Knull has? Nul.

It feels like V: TLD is building towards something, which feels misguided for the closer of a trilogy. Despite it being marketed as such, it never FEELS like the finale of a series. There’s no sense of completion, no sense of book-ending, no feeling that we’ve gone on a journey. It’s a shame, as the series has potential, and has found talented performers (the franchise would be A LOT worse without Hardy, and seeing Stephen Graham on the big screen is always welcomed), but it has never figured out what to do with either of those things. It has never felt like a coherent story across all three, especially in terms of tone. At times it’s felt more like a horror movie (the allusions to Alien are far too common to be accidental), at times they feel like a road movie, and at times they’re zany action movies. It really needed to focus on one genre and try to excel at that. Instead, it feels like they’ve tried to throw every idea they have, whether it suits the tone or not. Nobody stopped to ask “But this derails the themes” etc. They also never stopped to say “but this doesn’t make sense” at any point. The perfect example can be found in V: TLD. There’s a subplot of a family travelling to Area 51 due to it being closed down. They’re the only ones who try this. Are you saying that if the US government announced they were closing down Area 51 at a certain date, there would only be ONE family making that trip? There would be thousands of camper vans making that trip and I can’t think why the film would make us not think that would be the case. It would be more realistic, plus it would mean that the final chaotic action scenes would have a lot of near-deaths. The only reasons I can think they wouldn’t do this would be because the writers don’t want the characters in this universe to be aware of Venom (which is a shame, as having Venom die knowing that society accepts him is perfect, plus he’s been in enough crowd scenes that he’s definitely not a secret), or for budgetary reasons. Either way, it feels like a disappointing waste. Back in my review of the first Venom, I said “it wasn’t the worst film ever, but nowhere near as good as it could have been”, and my review of Let There Be Carnage mentioned how moments could be an entire movie are relegated to brief distractions. So whilst trilogies like Creed changed how I want fight scenes to be shown, Planet Of The Apes changed my expectations for motion capture, all I get from the Venom trilogy is to prepare to be disappointed. , I’m English, that’s my default state.