Eddie and Venom - and the film that they are in - have been known to thrive on chaos. They are at their best when the alarm bells ring the loudest and they have no options left but to go all out. There was no dearth of that in Let There Be Carnage, the second film of the Tom Hardy Venom trilogy. The third and final entry does not quite pull out the stops. Eddie and Venom aren't allowed a free run of the field. The result is a perfunctory, low-yield movie that lacks consistent pace and energy.
The unabashedly silly and defiantly campy flavour of Venom (2018) and the even more over-the-top 2021 sequel made the wild adventures and antics of Eddie Brock and the powerful Venom symbiote within him enjoyable in a weird, guilty-pleasure sort of way.
That is not the case with Venom: The Last Dance, designed to bring the curtain down on the Eddie-Venom partnership. The send-off is anything but memorable. Tom Hardy - the story is credited to him alongside first-time director Kelly Marcel - delivers an adequately earnest star turn. But those shoulders do droop when the burden of the heavy lifting gets out of hand.
With the focus shifting away from the lead actor ever so often in the 110-minute film, the intrinsically celebratory nature of the valediction is seriously undermined, turning the exercise into a near-joyless affair.
The spark of Venom and Let There Be Carnage goes missing when it should have been at its brightest. Venom: The Last Dance is out of step with the lively spirit that defined the first two films.
It flits in a disappointingly disorienting manner between its non-serious parts - these constitute the core of the film but are frequently played down - and the awkwardly solemn passages centred on the exploits of soldiers and scientists.
The latter stretches of the film - there are too many of them for the good of the movie - feel more like afterthoughts that have been ill-advisedly factored in with the ostensible aim of achieving tonal variation rather than like organic, orchestrated parts of the whole.
Written by the director herself (Marcel was a part of the writing team of Venom and its follow-up), the trilogy finale is not half as exciting, let alone nearly as rousing, as one would have anticipated it to be.
Venom: The Last Dance does have its share of CGI-fuelled action sequences as Eddie and Venom, with arrest looming large over them, set out for New York City to escape the law. They face many an impediments on their way there. The film, too, struggles to maintain consistency.
Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom are fugitives. They are pursued by the feds, a Xenophage (an indestructible creature sent by the all-powerful Knull) and a clandestine military unit tracking the alien symbiotes. The two are believed to have murdered Detective Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham) in San Francisco.
The fate of Detective Mulligan constitutes a sizeable chunk of the narrative. It feeds into situations that lead to crucial revelations as much for the soldiers as for their targets. But neither Eddie and Venom nor Knull's monsters are sitting ducks for the military men.
Venom: The Last Dance picks up from where Venom: Let There Be Carnage left off and attempts a dash through familiar territory only to be weighed down by a save-the-universe mission run by soldier Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) from the soon-to-be-decommissioned Area 51.
The military outfit works out of a top-secret subterranean laboratory that is headed by Dr Teddy Payne (Juno Temple), who supervises experiments to ascertain why the symbiotes have invaded the world of humans and run amok.
As the reasons for the advent of the symbiotes dawn upon them, they realise that the entire universe is in danger of annihilation. Super-villain Knull, the creator of the symbiotes, is looking for the key to his freedom - his imprisonment "for eternity" is the result of the symbiotes he created ganging up on him.
Venom and other symbiotes bear their fangs all right at regular intervals and the Xenophages, once they reveal themselves and their intentions, generate an air of menace that sets the stage for the climactic war against a force "older than the universe". Yet the film lacks bite for it rarely digs its teeth deep enough.
Venom: The Last Dance moves in fits and starts between Eddie/Venom, who is still as unstoppable as ever when they get going, which unfortunately isn't as often as expected, and Strickland/Payne, both of whom have personal and professional stakes in the work that they do even as they have been ordered by Pentagon to wind up and let their undercover operation die a quiet death.
But there isn't much scope for quietude in Venom: The Last Dance. Dr Payne has a tragic backstory that eggs her on and Strickland, who rarely goes by the book, is determined to eliminate the object called Codex that Knull seeks to fulfil his ambition.
Venom: The Last Dance devotes too much screen time to a sub-plot involving the alien-chasing family of hippie musician Martin (Rhys Ifans) who is on the road with his wife Nova Moon (Alanna Ubach), his two children Echo and Leaf and a dog named Blue. They inevitably drive into trouble in their enthusiasm to have a ringside view of aliens. They get too close for comfort.
The film manages a few flashes of superhero action brilliance - the one that towers well over the bedlam of the climax in Area 51 is the battle for survival that Eddie and Venom wage after they are chased off the top of a passenger aircraft by a Xenophage.
That apart, the film delivers a handful of decent detours along the way. These include a disastrous shot that Eddie and Venom have at a slot machine in Las Vegas, the city of second chances and a dance that Venom breaks into with dear old friend Mrs Chen (Peggy Lu). The cheerful moments are too few and far between.
Venom: The Last Dance is not Hardy enough. As a consequence, the spectacle that the film is meant to be is drowned out by its avoidable and frequent flirtation with stodginess.