Venom: The Last Dance is strictly dumb, chancing its luck.

Venom: The Last Dance – a self-declared and self-imposed curtain call for cinema’s favourite symbiote – clearly has its eyes set on delivering a high-stakes, epic finale for Eddie Brock, as he faces off against both earthly foes and a cosmic threat to symbiotes everywhere. In doing so, it doubles down on the franchise’s chaotic charm, throwing Eddie, Venom, and a colourful cast of allies and enemies into a showdown at Area 51 that’s as ambitious as it is messy and incoherent.

We rejoin Eddie (Tom Hardy) on the run from the authorities following the events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage and having concluded a brief and apparently completely inconsequential multiversal sidestep as shown in the post-credit scene of Spider-Man: No Way Home. Deciding to head to New York to clear their name, Eddie and Venom hitch a ride on a plane but are attacked by a seemingly indestructible alien hunter called a Xenophage, a servant of Knull (Andy Serkis), the exiled creator of the symbiotes who needs a codex (created when a symbiote revives its host) to escape his cosmic prison. Crash landing in the desert outside Las Vegas it’s not long before they draw the attention of Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the commander of the Imperium, an Area 51-based military unit tasked with capturing and studying symbiotes on Earth.

There’s something so inept and ham-fisted about the way Venom: The Last Dance crams in its info-dump retconning of the entire franchise to set up a big bad that’s as vaguely defined as it is peripheral to the actual events of the movie that it’s almost endearing. Almost. Knull is more a premise than a character, marking the second time Andy Serkis has sat in a big chair making big speeches and barely mattering at all, and his generic Xenophage henchmen (which bear an amusing similarity to the Dark Overlords of Howard The Duck) lack the personality to make the big showdown feel like anything more than a loose collection of generic CGI set-pieces.

In this current multiversal age, it’s hard to see the conspicuous casting of Chiwetel Ejiofor as a generic hard-nosed soldier and Rhys Ifans as the eccentric Martin Moon as anything but a desperately cynical move from Sony to once again tease the tenuous possibility that their floundering Spider-Man-less movie universe might just be connected to something that actually matters. Ejiofor’s presence in particular feels forced given that his character has zero interesting facets and could have been played by virtually anyone – or even anyone virtual, so rote and unremarkable is the role. At least Ifans’ Martin Moon, a quirky former IT worker turned Ufologist on a pilgrimage to Area 51 before its decommissioning brings a quirky, offbeat energy to proceedings and, along with his kooky family, forge a wonderful chemistry with Eddie and Venom that comes close to giving the movie real heart.

The story is poorly articulated, over-ambitious nonsense and both sets of antagonists, both alien and domestic, are pretty standard issue and ultimately the only things that make this woe begotten threequel worth watching are Hardy’s winningly rumpled performance as Eddie and his alter-ego Venom and Martin Moon’s alien-chasing antics. The dynamic between Eddie and Venom remains the film’s backbone, with Hardy continuing to capture their odd-couple vibe in a way that brings much-needed humour and warmth to the chaos and his interactions with the Moons offer moments of genuine poignancy and sweetness amidst the wearisome conveyer belt of seemingly relentless action beats. In a better timeline than the one we find ourselves in, Venom: The Last Dance would have been a Griswald-style cross country road movie comedy featuring Venom hitching a ride with the Moon family and getting into all kinds of hijinks and comedy scrapes before arriving in New York to finally clear their name. It would have been a far more fitting end to a franchise which never reached its potential and a far braver movie to have made than this depressingly by-the-numbers rock-‘em-sock-‘em CGI showdown.

Visually, The Last Dance doesn’t really offer anything new apart from a whole array of new symbiotes in a variety of colours who appear and disappear with little introduction or explanation. There may be fleeting moments of recognition for fans of the deep symbiote comic book lore as their favourite flavour of symbiote gets a microsecond or two in the spotlight but for the uninitiated, it’ll be straight to Wikipedia to try to figure out what specific symbiotes might have made their big-screen debuts and whether it actually matters in the grand scheme of things (spoilers: it doesn’t). For anyone in the wider general audience who just want to see a good-old-fashioned super-powered showdown, the climactic battle might feel more like watching a constantly shifting, shapeless mass of tendrils than a coherent fight, and the rapid-fire editing doesn’t really help clarify things any.

In the end, Venom: The Last Dance sees the franchise die as it lived, with an unrestrained, chaotic and occasionally incoherent and stupid final chapter that feels as rushed as it does grand. Fans who’ve stuck with the series may very well find plenty to enjoy in this anarchic, untidy farewell, but for the more casual fan, it’s a rickety rollercoaster that rarely slows down enough to make sense. As comic book movie endings go, it’s about as full and final as you probably expect, especially when the mid- and post-credit scenes make promises that are as likely to come to fruition as this movie is to win an Oscar.