Before I get started, there’s something I want perfectly clear: I am flat fucking DONE with this shit.

If you or anyone else on this godforsaken planet is still on board with Sony’s efforts at a Spider-Man cinematic universe without Spider-Man, I don’t know what to tell you. Everything I have to say, I’ve already said it a dozen times. I am out of things to say and out of fucks to give. And Sony apparently feels the same way.

The very day after Venom: The Last Dance premiered, Sony announced that they were moving forward with a new Spider-Man film in the MCU canon, with Tom Holland and director Daniel Destin Cretton both making their long-awaited returns to Earth-199999. Meanwhile, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse is still being indefinitely held until some strategically valuable point in the future, and the live-action “Spider-Man: Noir” spinoff TV series with Nicolas Cage is still in production. Also, Sony publicly parted ways with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the two superstar producers who were Sony’s last best hope at righting the ship.

Sony has sent a clear message: Whatever plans they have for Spider-Man moving forward, they will be focused on Spider-Man. Sony finally learned their lesson and the decks are being cleared. Not that I ever gave a shit about this grand experiment, but if Sony keeps acting like they’re done giving a shit, why would anyone start now?!

So why are we here with Venom: The Last Dance? Why was Venom the only Spider-Man supporting character with a standalone movie to get a sequel, and even a trilogy? Well, a lot of that has to do with Tom Hardy, the only lead in this failed megafranchise who ever had enough star power and producing savvy to make his own franchise happen. There’s also the matter of producer Avi Arad, who’s been so aggressively bullish on Venom for so long that he singlehandedly destroyed Spider-Man 3 to try and make Venom into a cash cow. Which might have been another inadvertent factor: It’s an old established rule that if a fan-favorite character is done dirty in the first attempt at a film adaptation, those fans will be frothing at the mouth in the hopes that the second attempt will get it right.

That was never in the cards for Venom.

On paper, I can understand how Venom is so iconic and marketable that he might be the only Spider-Man supporting character capable of powering his own franchise without Spider-Man. But the fundamental problem is that Venom’s origin story, his power set, his motivation… literally everything about Venom stems from Spider-Man. At the most fundamental and foundational level, there can be no Venom without Spider-Man.

Oh, and there’s also the teeny little stipulation that the Sony execs wanted to adapt an uber-violent antihero with a four-quadrant tentpole franchise. Because R-rated properties have consistently and faithfully been adapted into successful and satisfying PG-13 movies NEVER FUCKING EVER.

The bottom line here is that the fanbase for these movies doesn’t exist. Nobody gives a shit about Tom Hardy’s take on this character. These movies aren’t like Steel or Howard the Duck or Batman and Robin — they’re not bad enough to live on as guilty pleasures or cult favorites or cautionary tales. And they’re certainly not good enough or interesting enough — much less creative enough — to leave any kind of impact on the history of the genre. This isn’t even a case like Ben Affleck’s Batman or Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, because Tom Hardy got everything he wanted out of these movies. There is no untapped potential left to explore there. These movies are forgettable mediocrities, and their only staying power in the zeitgeist is due to Sony’s dogged persistence.

Venom: The Last Dance is trying to position itself as a grand send-off to the series, not unlike how Wolverine & Deadpool recently closed the book on the 20th Century Fox era of Marvel films. Trouble is, nobody wanted that send-off. This era never earned that send-off. There is no aspect of this whole “Whoops! No Spider-Man” megafranchise experiment that wanted or needed such a tearful goodbye. If there’s any part of Sony’s Marvel era that was worth that closure, we already got it with Spider-Man: No Way Home!

Anyway, now that we’re here, let me see how much of the dogshit premise I can sum up.

The premise begins with Knull, voiced by an uncredited Andy Serkis. Knull was the creator of the symbiotes, right up until they rebelled and locked him away in some nebulous prison beyond the stars. Unfortunately — for reasons far too convoluted to recount here — Venom and Eddie Brock accidentally created the Codex, a key that will allow for Knull’s release.

I hasten to add the crucial point that the Codex is only intact so long as Venom and Eddie are both alive and bonded together. And it can only be used while Eddie is in full Venom form. I won’t pretend that any of this makes any kind of internal logic, because this whole damn plot device was obviously constructed backwards from the premise of “Venom and Eddie have to die and/or split up or the world will end.”

I should add that while Knull is trapped in an extradimensional prison and stuck in some contraption that makes him completely immobile, he’s somehow capable of creating new alien life forms and teleporting them throughout the cosmos. Thus we have the xenophages, indestructible killing machines specially designed to hunt for the Codex and eat any life form that gets in the way.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the American government has responded to the ongoing symbiote crisis by decommissioning Area 51, moving all their extraterrestrial research to the massively upgraded and far more secretive Area 55. We’ve even got the Imperium, a shadowy government agency that tracks and contains alien activity. Enter General Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), your archetypal militant nutjob whose preferred means of dealing with aliens is to shoot first and sneer at any naive lunatic who even wants to ask questions. Said lunatics would be Dr. Teddy Paine (Juno Temple) and her assistant, Sadie Christmas (Clark Backo).

The bottom line is that Eddie/Venom are now on the run from an alien apex predator and an off-the-books alien containment division, while they’re also running from the feds and the local police after the events of the first two movies. And somehow, Eddie — who’s in Mexico at this point — decides the best course of action is to go back into the USA and travel clear across the country so he can blackmail a judge into clearing his name.

That alone should tell you how stupid and contrived this whole plot is. Even with everything we’ve already covered, there’s so much bullshit to unpack, I don’t know where to start.

First of all, I respect and appreciate that Juno Temple is aging artistically. It’s tough for any actor to make the transition away from playing characters in their teens and early twenties, and she seems to be doing a graceful job of it. Good for her. That said, her character was given way too much useless backstory and her character wasn’t as compelling as the filmmakers seemed to think or hope. It absolutely doesn’t help that Sadie is given so many similar functions in the story, she’s played by a more charismatic actor, and her flabby backstory is limited to an ostentatious Christmas tree pin that she insists on wearing out of season.

Strickland is another huge problem. This character only has one note throughout the whole movie, only barely and grudgingly developing a second dimension at the end of the climax. This is an aggressively stupid character who is consistently wrong about everything, either completely ineffectual or actively regressive, and not even Chiwetel Ejiofor — who’s clearly trying as hard as he can — is capable of making this a character we can take seriously. This is like if Jon Turturro played his character in Transformers (2007) totally straight, it was never going to work.

Then we have the xenophages. Though really, it’s only the one xenophage, as we don’t get any others until the climax. Two big problems here. First, the xenophage is only a giant alien beast. Which means it has no dialogue, no personality, and no motivation aside from hunting and eating. Nothing more than a giant CGI alien. Yawn.

The second and arguably bigger problem is that the very first time we get introduced to this thing, the xenophage gets literally thrown into a jet engine. The xenophage gets chopped up and blown up into a million little pieces that get dropped 40,000 feet to the ground… and then the xenophage simply reassembles itself and keeps going like nothing happened. Which means that all the action scenes are entirely useless, because we know perfectly well that there’s nothing any human or symbiote can do to hurt this thing. In turn, this inevitably means that whatever solution is ultimately found to deal with the problem, it’s guaranteed to be contrived horseshit.

Oh, and remember the general whose first and only answer to aliens is to shoot at them? No matter how many times it’s been explicitly shown that symbiotes and xenophages both shrug off bullets like hydroxychloroquine against COVID? To repeat, Strickland is a pathetic joke and it’s a damn shame he wasn’t played as such.

But hey, it’s not like the xenophage is the Big Bad, right? This is really a conflict with Knull, after all. Yeah, about that…

Knull is barely in this movie. He does literally nothing except for sending xenophages to Earth. All the other characters talk a big game about how we should all be afraid of Knull, but he’s never anything more than a glowering CGI effect. He’s got no plan, no motivation, and no backstory whatsoever. He’s a nobody. Yet this movie is somehow trying to position Knull as a Thanos-level threat. Just last week, writer/director/producer Kelly Marcel was talking up a big game about making Knull an overarching villain across multiple movies. BULL. FUCKING. SHIT.

The thing is, the characters spell out in clear detail exactly what would have to happen for Knull to escape. And after the events of this movie, those circumstances would be borderline impossible to replicate. More importantly, the film makes good on its promise and conclusively ends the Eddie/Venom symbiosis. And Carnage was explicitly killed off at the end of the second movie. Does Sony seriously want to move ahead without the two most recognizable and profitable symbiote characters in the canon? For that matter, do they want to move ahead without Tom Hardy when he was the only reason anyone remotely cared about these movies? Are they gonna try and build up Juno Temple and her character up to that level? Don’t make me laugh.

Seriously, show me where Knull could possibly fit into the direction where Sony is taking this franchise. He’s not going into “Spider-Man: Noir” or Beyond the Spider-Verse unless somebody wants to try and cram symbiotes and generic universe-destroying bullies into either one. And no way in hell is anyone going to try and fit Knull into the MCU. Leaving aside that it’s a totally separate continuity, who the hell needs Knull when Galactus and Doctor Doom are already on the way? And are we really wasting time with this shit when we still have to get the mutants into the MCU somehow?!

What I’m really trying to say here is that this movie has an antagonist problem. The villains in this movie are boring, and there’s no fun or progress to be had from engaging them. I don’t even mind that the action scenes (except for the climax) are so visibly truncated, because Venom is either mopping the floor with generic hapless baddies (without any trace of blood when he’s biting their heads off, naturally) or he’s wasting time grappling with an alien beast who can’t be hurt.

Sometimes, the villains are so useless that our leads have to dumb themselves down just to keep the plot moving forward. My favorite example comes when Eddie/Venom actually arrive in Vegas. They go to a casino for no good reason. They run into Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), who’s there for no good reason. And then — against the repeated and vocal warnings of Eddie, because they both know it’ll attract the xenophage directly to them — Venom takes his full form for a dance number with Mrs. Chen for absolutely no fucking good reason.

In this whole movie, the only supporting characters worth a damn are the eccentric family of tourists (played by Rhys Ifans, Alanna Ubach, Hala Finley, and Dash McCloud) heading out to see Area 51 before it gets demolished. Yes, their most important contribution to the plot is that they arbitrarily get into trouble so Venom has to save them. But perhaps more importantly, these are total strangers who give the film some much-needed heart. They help to remind Eddie of his human side, which is particularly important, given the distinct possibility that Eddie may have to go back to being a full-time human in the immediate future. And after all the shit that’s gotten wrecked over the course of this series, it’s worth asking if Eddie is even capable of building a new life as an ordinary mortal.

As with the prior two movies, the only aspect of this movie that completely and totally works is Tom Hardy. Granted, this particular take on Eddie/Venom is its own thing and it bears virtually no resemblance to the source material. Even so, Hardy makes a meal out of playing a put-upon schlub cursed with talking to himself, and he sounds like he’s having a blast in the recording booth.

The whole “road trip” structure of this movie — hell, the entire movie itself — was specifically built so Eddie/Venom would be centered at all times, and all the other characters would only be sounding boards briefly passing through. The approach does a disservice to the other characters, and the villains are so especially disserviced that they can barely be considered characters at all. And yes, it does get rather obnoxious how the plot ties itself into knots trying to lift up the main characters and get them where the filmmakers want them to be for whatever reason. Even so, this was the only way it could’ve gone.

As with the previous two movies, Venom: The Last Dance is emblematic of Sony’s entire “Spider-Man megafranchise without Spider-Man” experiment. It’s so mediocre and unmemorable that the only reason anyone knows about it is because Sony put so much money and effort trying to convince everyone that it was a huge deal. It’s a boring movie that tries to deliver CGI action set pieces without any of the stakes or balance to make those sequences exciting.

But what really gets stuck in my craw is the part where this movie continues to entertain delusions of megafranchise viability, writing checks the filmmakers can’t possibly hope to cash. There’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll see the Isabela Merced/Sydney Sweeney/Celeste O’Connor Spider Team before we ever see Knull come back. Hell, we might even see the Morbius/Vulture crossover happen before Knull comes back.

All things considered, it’s a mercy that this trilogy is finally over and all the relevant actors have come away from it unscathed. Now can we please stop pretending that anyone ever gave a shit about this franchise? Can we all just chalk up this trilogy as a massive waste of time and move on?