“Venom: The Last Dance” - Booooooooooo!

With the success of Venom ($856 million box office) in 2018, Sony Pictures executives were probably clinking champagne glasses, fully confident that their fledgling Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU) was well-positioned for long-term success. You know, the same universe that doesn’t actually include Spider-Man. In 2021, Venom: Let There Be Carnage released and saw a $350 million decline in the box office to $507 million. While still a box office success, this had to cause at least one Sony exec to put his champagne glass down in concern for the SSU.

Then Morbius and Madame Web were inflicted upon audiences and, to put it mildly, audiences hated both movies. In fact, they hated them so much that both quickly became box office bombs (Madame Web bombing far more than Morbius). At this point, the execs had to be sweating bullets because the SSU suddenly looked like a smoldering disaster. “But,” they thought, “at least audiences will stick with the SSU after seeing Venom: The Last Dance, right? Right?!”

Before I tell you anything about Last Dance, tell me if you think this is a good sign...IMDb and the wiki page for Last Dance state its running time is one hour and fifty minutes. When the end credits started rolling, I checked my watch and only one hour and thirty minutes had passed since the start of the film. So, either we went through a time tunnel or a whole bunch of footage was recently chopped from the movie. Considering how terrible Last Dance turned out to be, I can’t imagine the circle of hell the cut footage came from.

My friend described Last Dance succinctly - that it comes off merely like a collection of things those same champagne swilling execs insisted must comprise the movie. Venom horse, venom fish, venom frog, different colored symbiotes (like Venom) with maybe some random powers, Area 51, a sing-a-long in a VW bus with a hippie family, a dance number, a rocket launcher, a tiny glimpse of the creator of the symbiotes (Knull), Las Vegas, monsters with wood chipper mouths, Eddie Brock/Venom (Tom Hardy) riding on the outside of a cruising jetliner, and, for some reason, Chiwetel Ejiofor. And none of those things worked.

You might think I’m being harsh, but the movie takes exactly zero seconds to start sucking. It begins with an exposition dump to explain the movie we’re about to watch, except the dump itself is confusing. Then, it retcons the mid-credit scene from Let There Be Carnage (probably because Marvel Studios made them after a test screening) to effectively negate it. This is explicitly stamped home when Venom states “I’m so done with this multiverse shit” during a badly edited scene of Eddie/Venom making itself a drink at the bar. Only a few minutes into the film and we’re already wondering if Madame Web isn’t the worst movie of the year.

The film only becomes less coherent from there. All of those exec-ideas I listed two paragraphs ago are essentially rolled into a giant ball of garbage, set on fire, and drop-kicked into your car and all you can do is watch it burn. Cringe along with Eddie as he is forced to listen to hippie dad (Rhys Ifans) and his family sing “Ground Control to Major Tom.” Wish somebody would chloroform you so don’t have to watch Venom and Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) dance together to ABBA for no reason in her Vegas penthouse suite. Pop enough ibuprofen to prevent going into a seizure from the terribly shot and edited CGI fight scenes that somehow manage to be boring. Cry into your popcorn every time Ejiofor (as General Strickland) performs as if he forgot he isn’t in a serious movie like 12 Years a Slave or even a good popcorn flick like Doctor Strange. Try not to boo at everyone in the theater laughing at unfunny and poorly delivered wisecracks that were clearly added in post-production by a badly coded AI. You know what? Disregard that last one - boo to your heart’s content.

I could go on (and on), but I think you get the point. If Morbius and Madame Web haven’t fully killed the SSU, I have a really hard time believing Last Dance will do anything more than keep the franchise on life support, if it doesn’t pull the plug altogether. And that has to terrify the execs looking at their December calendars and seeing the release date for the next SSU movie - Kraven the Hunter - fast approaching. Probably a good idea to keep that next bottle of champagne on ice.

Rating: Ask for all of your money back for all of the Venom movies and boo loudly while you do it.

“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” - It’s not complicated.

We’ve seen the multiverse coming to the MCU for quite a while. It all started when the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) taught us about the multiverse in Doctor Strange. We get another glimpse of it in Avengers: Endgame, when the Ancient One explained to Hulk that schisms in the timeline could lead to multiple, alternate timelines or universes. It’s possible the quantum realm in Ant-Man is one of those universes. We get more hints at it in Avengers: Infinity War when Doctor Strange tells Tony Stark that he looked at over fourteen million timelines to find one where they defeated Thanos. The point is all of the phase four MCU films and shows have been pointing us toward the multiverse, especially Loki and Spider-Man: No Way Home, the latter of which very much operates as the prologue to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

On that note, please don’t listen to the crotchety critics that say you need to do a bunch of homework to enjoy Multiverse of Madness (or any MCU movie, for that matter). You don’t. Some people love to complain about there being too much to follow in the MCU - as if the MCU being rich in content is somehow a bad thing - which makes it hard to understand the movies. That’s like picking up book four of the Harry Potter series, then complaining that you don’t know who all these kids and teachers are and that you don’t get the references to past things. Of course you don’t. But you can still understand and enjoy the story in that book, even if you don’t what the Marauder’s map is.

Multiverse of Madness is really easy to follow, even if you have never seen an MCU film or show. There’s a wizard. He knows magic and is the good guy. There’s a witch. She’s knows magic and is the bad guy. There are an infinite number of parallel universes and they are going to travel to some of them. Wizard must stop witch from doing bad thing. The end. It really is that easy - no studying required.

For folks who have even a passing familiarity with the MCU or saw the movie poster, you know the wizard is Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the witch is Wanda, a.k.a. Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). You’ll also recognize returning characters Wong (Benedict Wong), Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and Christine (Rachel McAdams) from the first Doctor Strange. The one important new character is America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), who can open portals to any world in the multiverse. If there is anything else you should know it’s that Wanda had a psychotic break when Vision died (in Infinity War), and, after mentally torturing the town of Westview (in Wandavision) and conjuring herself two fake children, retreated to a secluded cabin to master the magic described in the book called the Darkhold. Having lost Vision and the imagined kids, Wanda is hellbent on finding a way to be with versions of her kids that do actually exist in other universes.

For folks who know way too much about the MCU and are also comic book nerds, there’s a lot to take in during Multiverse. With every new entry in the MCU, we get more and more call outs and tie-ins to previous chapters, plus hints at things still to come. Multiverse is positively brimming with all of those things, especially the hints at the future. A couple of these reveals had the audience clapping and myself exclaiming “holy shit, holy shit, HOLY SHIT!!” As I am 100% MCU nerd and 0% comic book nerd, I still haven’t the faintest idea where all of phase four is leading us. Especially after the mid-credit scene, where I found myself exclaiming “whoa, fuck, really?!”

Clearly, I’m doing my best to avoid spoiling anything for you, so let’s talk about the aesthetics of the film. Marvel Studios and head Marvel producer/president Kevin Feige have done an excellent job over the years of hiring directors and giving them a lot of leeway with their particular styles. Multiverse has a very distinct style from what we’re used to, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. When the credits rolled and I saw “directed by Sam Raimi,” it all clicked. Multiverse will remind you of Evil Dead, Spider-Man, and an acid trip, but still feel very much like an MCU movie. In retrospect, Raimi seems ideal for a movie like Multiverse. There is a bit of gruesomeness, psychedelics, some very slight camp, and humor, all movie traits that Raimi excels at. If some of the camera angles and techniques don’t scream Raimi, a couple of multiverses we get a peek at do. The best part is that Raimi has MCU money, so he gets to do special effects that don’t involve rubber and corn syrup. Though, that also would have been a funny universe.

Whether you are a very casual moviegoer or a hardcore superhero dork, you are going to enjoy Multiverse. If you like long, slow-burning storylines, you’re good. If you like Benedict Cumberbatch, Rachel McAdams, or Elizabeth Olsen, you’re good. If you really just like Cumberbatch, you’re good. If you like fun, trippy movies, you’re good. If you like magic, you’re good. If you just want to be entertained by a big, bright, loud blockbuster, you’re good. If you like comic books, you’re going to explode. It’s that simple.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back, in this universe or any other universe.