Venom: The Last Dance is an embarrassing final act

I remember exactly where I knew Venom: The Last Dance lost me.

It's about a half-hour into the movie, and Eddie Brock/Venom (both Tom Hardy), on his way from Mexico to New York, plummets from an airplane into some unknown part of America. He hijacks a horse and continues to hoof it.

Shenanigans ensue, and he hitches a ride from a family of UFO watchers on their way to Area 51. They promise to drop Eddie off in Las Vegas, as it's on the way.

At this point, I had to squint. Even with every bit of goodwill I could muster, I couldn't make that logic work. If Eddie is heading from Mexico to New York and even made a good portion of the trip on foot after his fall, what kind of road trip is the family taking that's going out of their way by an entire state in the opposite direction?

It's what Steven Spielberg said about the exploding gas canister in Jaws. If the audience asks about the logic behind the explosion at that point, the film doesn't work.

A good movie overcomes logic and works on an emotional level. We don't question how they transported King Kong to New York, because the final spectacle is worth the leap in logic.

Venom: The Last Dance expects us to be onboard the insanity simply because we've bought a ticket. It's a film without a story, though a lot happens, and not a single memorable character despite introducing at least a handful of new ones. It feels like a collection of TikTok videos, except even those show more imaginative storytelling than this $120 million dud.

The story, as much as I can piece together, involves a MacGuffin called The Codex, which resides in Venom/Brock's head. It came there because they died in the previous movie. The Codex unlocks the prison holding Knull (Andy Serkis), who spends the film in a darkened room explaining to the audience what they just saw. The only way to destroy The Codex is for either Venom or Brock to die.

This leads to the question: Why couldn't they do what they did in the last film where they died and got better? Again, emotionally we shouldn't care. Yet Venom: The Last Dance gives us no reason to overlook its shoddy plotting. We ask because we're bored, and we're bored because we don't care.

Brock is now a fugitive, though he spends most of his time in the most public places possible without anyone recognizing him. His pursuers are an unknown and unnamed organization led by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Juno Temple. They disagree on how to treat the symbiotes. We know that because they say so in their first scene to each other. No, they didn't just meet for the first time. But it's good to keep the audience clear on these things.

Temple and Ejiofor try, as does Clark Backo, yet they can't save a film so utterly disinterested in its characters. Not even its leads.

For two hours, Venom and Brock go from one uninteresting and poorly edited set piece to another. At times, they narrate the missing pieces of the plot directly to the audience. Like Madame Web, previously the worst comic book film of the year, Venom: The Last Dance is so cut to within an inch of its life that entire sequences rely on awkward dubbing to make sense. Even then, it's a chore to watch.

Usually, I'm fine with one-note characters if I can care about the action. But Venom: The Last Dance makes no effort to wring out even an iota of drama from yet another "the world is at peril" plot. Instead, it's a collection of loud bangs, dated needle drops that other films have done better, and this general stench that everyone involved is done with this franchise.

There's another scene during the road trip that encapsulates how it feels to watch Venom: The Last Dance: Eddie, trapped in an RV with a family he doesn't like, has to endure a sing-a-long where everyone sings off-key.

Like him, we're trapped in an enclosed space for an indeterminate amount of time, uncertain why we're there. All we know is the atmosphere is foul and nobody is having fun.