Movies

Peter Suderman | 10.25.2024 10:31 AM

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.

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.

Venom was introduced as a........

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