Several years ago, due a lot of legal shenanigans involving complicated rights issues, Sony ended up with the rights to the Spider-Man characters. Big time hero geeks like me know the chaotic details of this, and the rest of the world probably doesn’t care. Then, years later but a few years ago now, Sony and Marvel worked out a sort of shared custody deal allowing Spider-Man into the MCU, so he could play the with Avengers and related characters. But Sony kept cranking out various movies with Spider-Man related characters that the general public was likely unfamiliar with. The only one of these to meet any measure of success was Venom, who is now back for his third and final (allegedly) outing in Venom: Last Dance.

There will be spoilers in this review. But when you’re dealing with a movie that was written and directed by the same person, with a screenplay by that same person and the lead actor, you probably can guess a lot of how things are going to go. There’s a series I very much enjoy on YouTube called Pitch Meeting, which does great snarky takes on pop culture movies, usually superheroes and big franchises. They haven’t done one for this yet, but I really hope they get to it.

When we last saw Venom, he got highjacked into a post-credit scene in Spider-Man: No Way Home for some of the multiverse madness. By the rules the movie set out for how this was happening, this made no sense at all, but they revisit the scene to kick the movie off. Why? I have no idea. Maybe to get whatever little piece of the MCU into this they could.

While I consider my comic book knowledge to be fairly extensive, I’ve never really liked Venom (first he was Spider-Man’s new costume, then he was a villain, now they keep trying to make him an anti-hero), so I have no idea how much of this was from the comics, or adapted from them. The big peril in this story is there are these things called Xenophages that serve a big mysterious bad guy who has been locked away since before the universe started. The Xenophages look a lot like the Brood, nasty aliens the X-Men have fought which were, in turn, based on the Xenomorphs from the Aliens Franchise. These things come to Earth seeking the symbiotes like Venom because one of them will be special and help release the big bad, known as Knull (Andy Serkis, totally wasted in this role).

Naturally, Venom is this special one, and a Xenophage shows up to scare the hell out of Venom (that’s new at least) and early on show us how indestructible they are, surviving being Cusianarted in a jet engine, bursting into flame, and then falling tens of thousands of feet. Much of the rest of the movie turns into an on-going chase, as Venom/Eddie are on the run from the Xenophages, as well as a special forces team that hunts aliens (badly). In one scene, the soldiers, despite being dropped in Nevada, have special armor that turns into scuba gear, because who wouldn’t load that up for the desert? Also improbably, Eddie manages to kill one of them while separated from Venom, because of course an ex-reporter can take out a Special Forces trooper.

Among the recurring things in the movie are a family with sort of flower children/alien lovers as parents, and two kids that are really over this trip, Eddie losing shoes (did someone have a foot fetish in this production?), and the stereotyped rivalry between a military man (We must kill them all!) and a scientist (These aliens are beautiful (no, they’re really not) we must study them). Eventually, we get a massive battle between Xenophages (Knull seems to have a lot of them but only sends them to Earth one or two at a time, ala martial arts fights where the gang attacks one at a time) and the symbiote “army” (six is an army?). The movie seems to end with a final separation between Eddie and Venom, although they lay seeds for several different ways the story can continue. Also, according to the trailers ahead of the movie, Sony’s next Spider-ish release is Kraven (delayed several times before) coming out in December. That was as specific as they go, and December isn’t that far off, folks.

What I Liked: Um. Some of the effects were cool.

What I Didn’t: So much. The allegedly smart and well-trained soldiers know sonics work well on the symbiotes, so when more aliens from the same place show up… they keep trying to shoot them. The aliens reconstitute from almost anything, but die from something not exactly unknown on Earth. Also, when the symbiotes attack, and they supposedly know about these things, they attack with improvised swords? They shoehorn in Mrs. Chen in a really unlikely appearance, and Venom risks everything, doing something he KNOWS will attract the Xenophages, so he can dance with her? Then the elite soldiers from their super-secret project grab Eddie/Venom from one of the busiest cities on Earth and leave her as a witness? I mentioned Eddie killing the Spec Ops soldier. Also, all the video cameras that give the military alerts on where Venom is look exactly the same, from a tiny village in Mexico to the streets of Vegas. The entirety of the special force to contain aliens is a small unit under the ruins of “decommissioned” Area 51?

There’s a scene in which one of the many absurd things are happening around Eddie, and he asks, “Why is this happening?” That’s a great question.

I’m giving this a 2 out of 5, and that might have been kind.