Venom: The Last Dance spends most of its runtime as a road movie about a wanted man and his alien roommate trying to get to New York so the alien can dance on the Empire State Building, and it’s at its best exactly there, before the plot remembers it needs a government facility and a god in a cage. I liked a lot of this one. I also came out of it with more questions than the film seems to think it earned.
Eddie’s on the run for a death he didn’t cause, hiding out in Mexico with Venom, and the two of them decide the safest move is somehow the least safe one: cross the whole country while every law enforcement agency is looking for them. That’s the kind of logic these films run on and by now I’ve made my peace with it, because the point was never the plan. The point is watching two losers who can’t stand each other and can’t survive apart, and Venom: The Last Dance leans into that harder than either of the first two films did.
Along the way they pick up a hippie family on a road trip to see aliens, and the film spends genuine time with them instead of treating them as a quick gag and moving on. It’s an odd choice for a movie with a runtime this tight, and it mostly pays off, because it gives Eddie someone to be a person around who isn’t Venom or a government agent chasing him down. A general with a grudge is hunting them the whole way, which is fine as far as it goes, but it’s the least interesting thread in a film that otherwise seems to know exactly which of its ideas are worth the screen time.
The best sequence is the one nobody needed a script for
Venom bonds with a horse. Then a frog. Then there’s a full dance number with Mrs. Chen set to “Dancing Queen” in a Las Vegas casino, and for about twenty minutes this movie knows exactly what it’s supposed to be and commits completely. It’s the funniest stretch in the whole trilogy and it’s not close. None of it moves the plot forward in any meaningful way and I didn’t care even a little, because these are the scenes where the franchise finally trusts its own weirdness instead of apologizing for it.
Put that twenty minutes next to the strangest scenes from the first film and you can see the throughline: this series is consistently better when it lets Venom be a genuine oddball loose in the world than when it’s servicing a supervillain plot. The road-movie stretch is the good film here. Everything back at the government facility is the other movie bolted onto it.
Where did all these symbiotes come from?
Here’s the thing I couldn’t get past. Area 51’s Imperium facility turns out to be sitting on a whole collection of captured symbiotes, kept in tanks and studied for who knows how long, and the film just expects me to accept that they’ve been there the entire time without ever being mentioned across two previous movies. It’s not a small detail either. Every one of those symbiotes gets released and dies defending the base in the finale, which is supposed to land as a sacrifice, but I spent that whole sequence wondering where this stockpile came from instead of feeling what the scene wanted me to feel.
That’s the film’s real problem in miniature. It keeps introducing big swings, a secret facility, a captive-symbiote population, a god-tier threat, without doing the legwork to make any of them feel like they were always part of this story rather than invented three movies in because the plot needed somewhere to go. The xenophages themselves have the same issue. They’re supposed to track Venom specifically through his full symbiote form, except the rule bends whenever the story needs it to, which is a small thing on its own but adds up alongside everything else that gets introduced and then quietly reworked to fit whatever the next scene needs.
Knull is a genuinely enormous comics character used as a voice in a cave
Knull is the reason every symbiote exists, imprisoned by his own creations, and the whole engine of this film’s plot runs on freeing or containing him. And yet he barely appears as anything more than a voice and a silhouette for most of the runtime. One review put it about as well as I could, pointing out how little actual impact the character has on screen relative to how much the plot depends on him. I felt that same gap watching it. Introducing a threat that big and disposing of him without ever really letting him arrive is either admirable restraint or a franchise hedging its bets on a sequel it’s already said won’t happen, and right now I genuinely can’t tell which.
Does the sacrifice land?
Venom lets go over that acid pool, taking the last xenophage down with him to destroy the Codex and keep Knull locked away, and it’s meant to be the emotional peak of three films of comedy cashing in on one real loss. The effects and the action leading up to it are genuinely well done, some of the best in the whole trilogy, and I enjoyed watching it happen even while I wasn’t sure it had earned the weight it wanted.
The trilogy’s actual arc was always the relationship, not the plot, and on that level it does land: these are two losers who found each other, and one of them chooses to die for the other. Whether the moment works depends on how much goodwill the horse-and-frog stretch banked for it, and for me it mostly did, even with the door left open by that fragment of symbiote still alive in a lab vial from the first film. Maybe.
Sony’s slate in late 2024, and what it says about where this ends
This lands in a year where Sony’s wider Spider-Man-adjacent universe has been visibly struggling. Morbius and Madame Web both landed badly, and a film billed outright as the trilogy’s finale while still ending on two hooks says something about how much confidence the studio actually has in closing the book. It’s not the only comic-book adjacent project wobbling under its own weight this year either. DC had its own version of this conversation not long before, a franchise-defining film that couldn’t quite decide if it was an ending or a reset either.
I don’t think that comparison is an accident so much as a sign of where the whole genre is right now. Studios keep building toward finales and crossovers before they’ve actually earned the audience’s trust that those payoffs are coming, and both of these films end up hedging as a result: closing the current chapter while visibly keeping a door propped open in case the sequel gets greenlit after all. It’s a strange way to send a trilogy off, wanting credit for an ending while refusing to fully commit to one.
I’d give this a 3.5, same as the last one. Some genuinely great effects and action, and I had a great time with the road-trip stretch specifically, but the ending pretty much killed my hopes for Venom showing up properly in the MCU the way the stinger two films back seemed to promise. That fragment left behind in Mexico is still out there, so maybe there’s still a door open somewhere. I wouldn’t bet the house on it.