Venom: The Last Dance Is a Camp Buddy Comedy Disguised as a Comic Book Movie
Who says the rom-com is dead? Venom: The Last Dance is a slapstick, silly, oddly sweet romp about a mismatched couple on a zany road trip across the American West. It just happens that the couple is a disgruntled journalist with a rap sheet and a brain-eating alien symbiote that latched onto him, giving him an array of superpowers. It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination. Please do not take this as an endorsement or a recommendation. But it’s campy, absurd, and self-aware—a trashy, intermittently amusing movie that wants nothing more than to be trashy and amusing.Â
The Last Dance is the third film in the surprise-hit Venom franchise, a kinda-sorta spinoff of the Spider-Man movies based on one of the comic book character’s most popular nemeses. What makes Venom such an intriguing villain in the comics is that he doesn’t conceive of himself as a villain: Instead, he’s the “lethal protector,” a do-gooder, or rather a pair of do-gooders—man and symbiote—who just happens to share a hatred of Spider-Man.Â
Venom was introduced as a fairly straightforward villain character in the late 1980s, a sort of dark Spider-Man powered by resentment and rejection: The journalist, Eddie Brock, was a rival of Spider-Man’s newspaper photographer alter ego Peter Parker, and the alien symbiote had initially bonded with Parker, giving him a sleek black suit with unusual powers, before Parker fought it off, realizing it had malevolent intentions. Together, Brock and the symbiote became Venom, a slobbering, many-toothed, gooey character with delusions of heroism.Â
Over time, however, the character become popular enough that he was transformed into something closer to a conventional hero, or at least an antihero. First a new, more villain
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