The commercial success of the Venom franchise — the first two films made over $1.3 billion internationally — in spite of a repeat critical bashing should give it licence to just do as it pleases. When you’re critic-proof, why not let your freak flag fly? Take some crazy swings. One of the more disappointing things about the series, and especially this instalment, is a seeming nervousness about straying from formula. Despite its title character supposedly being an agent of chaos, it only flirts with proper weirdness, always letting its more conservative side prevail.
At the end of the last movie, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his flesh-eating alien alter-ego Venom (also Hardy, via fully committed growling vocals) were on the run, unfairly wanted for the ostensible murder of a policeman (Stephen Graham). All that becomes mere inconvenience when Venom learns he’s being hunted by minions of his tyrannical creator, Knull, who needs Venom to free him from some kind of goth tree prison. The only way to foil Knull is for either Brock or Venom to die.
It’s all pretty one-note, and the comedy of it is never pushed very hard.
As a set-up it makes little sense, but it’s all to try to give some emotional heft to this apparently final film. Man and goop must be separated or Earth will perish. There is something about the Venom/Brock dynamic that just about carries these films, but it hasn’t built the character foundations it needs to land this story. Watching Hardy bicker with himself can be fun, but it’s all pretty one-note, and the comedy of it is never pushed very hard. The series has always had the potential to be something genuinely unique in the superhero-movie genre, a sort of Deadpool-ish anarchic comedy with a horror twist, if only it would take a risk.
Instead, we get lame sequences like Brock/Venom smashing up a bar making cocktails, and a flatpack plot involving Area 51, some more vials of alien slop, and far too much time with a hippy family on a road trip. Kelly Marcel, a writer on the first two films, moves into the director’s seat here. It’s not fully fair to judge a debut director’s skills based on the third movie in a franchise, with all the constraints that brings, but she does a functional job. Her action sequences are decent. It’s more surprising that her comedy scenes lack zip, and every time there’s the possibility of interesting character development — Eddie, at one point, has to kill someone in a way he can’t blame on Venom — it’s left unexplored.
If, as seems very likely, this concludes the Venom story in its current form, then it wraps up as a series that sadly never fulfilled its promise. There have been moments of gonzo enjoyment along the way, but like its title character, it is in essence just a dark, globby mess.
