“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.

“Venom: Let There Be Carnage” - Yeah, PG-13 Carnage.

In order to understand how low my expectations were for Venom: Let There Be Carnage, think about some of the movies that have come out this year that should have been entertaining, but absolutely crapped the bed. Without Remorse, Mortal Combat, F9, and Snake Eyes were terrible and that is coming right on the heels of the abomination that was Wonder Woman 1984. And I only expected one of those movies to be non-stupid. Then, think about the first Venom film. It was so unremarkable that I remember almost nothing about it, including that I said to only ask for half your money back. To be fair, that film came out in 2018, which was roughly three hundred years ago, so it’s mostly a vague memory at this point.

(Not a lot to SPOILER, but there is one thing in the movie worth keeping a secret.)

A friend of mine asked if they needed to watch Venom before watching Let There Be Carnage. Answer? No. Really no. It’s not like Sony had some grand plan for Venom. This is the same company that killed the Spider-Man franchise...twice. This is the same company that got into a pissing match with Marvel over how to split the money that Marvel made them after Marvel fixed Spider-Man. Venom was nothing more than Tom Hardy arguing with himself in two different, equally obnoxious voices, except when it was nothing more than two CGI blobs swirling around a clearly bored Michelle Williams.

The only thing we need to know is that Venom is an alien symbiote attached to reporter Eddie Brock (Hardy) that sometimes appears as a black tentacle with a face attached to Eddie’s back, sometimes engulfs Eddie’s body as a black, muscular, nightmare, acid-trip Spider-Man, and sometimes is nothing more than Hardy yelling lines at himself in his worst Batman voice. This kind of worked in Venom, at least enough to feel fresh, but it gets annoying fast in Let There Be Carnage. You’ll be glad to be distracted by chickens a few minutes into the film. That’s right, chickens.

What little plot exists in Let There Be Carnage is thin enough as to be invisible. Venom wants to eat the brains of criminals, but Eddie has him on a diet of chickens and chocolate. They bicker like an old married couple and a lot of things in Eddie’s apartment get broken. Then, they have a breakup of sorts. Worst romantic comedy ever.

Meanwhile, serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) is about to be executed and wants Eddie to tell Cletus’ story to the world. You know, for reasons. When Eddie gets too close to Cletus’ cage, Cletus bites Eddie and gets some Eddie-Venom blood in his mouth. We see the blood jiggling on its own and this is how Carnage comes to be. No, seriously. It is a known fact that if you bite a symbiote-infected human, it will birth a brand new symbiote and be red because...human blood is red. It’s better known in medical circles as the Reverse Zombie.

Obviously, Cletus escapes his execution now that he has Carnage to provide super powers. Now-free Cletus wants to rescue his past love interest, Shriek (Naomie Harris), from a secret lab/prison. He and Carnage agree that after they bust her out, they will exact revenge on Venom, Eddie, and the cop that captured Shriek so many years ago. Again, for reasons. In movie circles, this plot is better known as the Sony shit-take.

That’s it. That’s the whole movie. Like its predecessor, Let There Be Carnage is thin on plot, heavy on Tom Hardy trying to prove we’ve all overestimated his acting chops, more of Michelle Williams looking really confused as to how she ended up in a non-tear-jerking, non-Oscar-bait, non-drama, Woody Harrelson being directed to just go nuts man, and of course, more swirling CGI blobs fighting each other. And, it doesn’t even have the decency to be rated-R. To be fair, I knew going in that this would be what it was. I was mildly curious as to how Andy Serkis would do as director and the answer was what if Gollum had won? But, my curiosity ended there. The only saving graces of the movie were its short running time (97 minutes) and jaw-dropping mid-credits scene. Turns out, Sony might have just learned something in their fight with Marvel.

Rating: Ask for all your money back because it met my expectations.