With some notable exceptions – the gloriously camp Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges, 1980) and neo-Noir theatrics of The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) – comic book movies often represent cinema at their most banal, boring and downright insipid. Venom: The Last Dance does virtually nothing to salvage the label, and while it might be game over Eddie Brock, Marvel comics will continue to churn out mediocrity, undernourished material for the interminable future. And unlike a comic book, franchises never seem to end, no matter how pedestrian the work – never high art by any stretch of the imagination – becomes.

For the lucky few unfamiliar with the Venom trilogy, Eddie Brock (a weirdly miscast Tom Hardy) was infected by a Symbiote that transformed him into a Jekyll type monster who feasts on misery. For some reasons unknown to anyone but the writers, Brock and Venom find themselves in Mexico where japes and drunken merriment await them. Invariably, they return to New York to defeat the Xenophage, an extraterrestrial force that has come to earth in a last ditch effort to conquer it. Despite being a virus of unquantifiable properties, the Venom Symbiote takes pity on the earthlings and elects to fight the enemies off.

It is no exaggeration to claim that the plot sounds AI-generated. Venom: The Last Dance isn’t just an inessential film, but an insulting one when you consider the calibre of the talent on display (Andy Serkis, Rhys Ifans and Stephen Graham are just some of the talent on display.) Despite the torrent of British talent, their work is sidelined for a series of badly-conceived special effects that add nothing of creative or intellectual value to the proceedings. It’s like watching paint dry, albeit the most costly colours out there!

Hardy looks bored on what is only his third time playing the character, and cannot seemingly find anything new to bring to Brock.He’s little better as the symbiote, which barely saves a movie with not one, but two awful performances. First, there’s Chiwetel Ejiofor who delivers the most wooden performance of his career, while Juno Temple’s Teddy Payne is a dictionary definition of miscast. Each and every cast member would be better off moving onto a more lo-fi or low-key project afterwards that tests their abilities as an artist, rather than a work which tests their reflex against green screen.

The feature swiftly runs out of plug, but wades along for more than an hour full of badly-written dialogue and worse character development. By the time the film comes to that sluggish ending, audiences could be forgiven in asking Hollywood to press pause on the comic book machine, and give more worthwhile movies (by which we mean virtually anything else in any genre) a chance to shine in the omniplexes. Mercifully, this is the last waltz for one segment of this comic book madness; hopefully more will follow.

Venom: The Last Dance is in cinemas on Friday, October 25th. On VoD on Tuesday, December 10th (2025).