Review: Tom Hardy’s double act can’t save ‘Venom: The Last Dance’

For three films now, Tom Hardy has smushed Jekyll and Hyde into one strange and slimy double act. In a Marvel universe filled with alter egos that cloak stealthy superpowers, his investigative reporter Eddie Brock doesn’t transform. He shares his body with an ink-black alien symbiote (voiced with a baritone growl by Hardy), who sometimes swallows him whole, sometimes shoots a tentacle or two out, and always chipperly punctuates Eddie’s inner monologue.

These have been consistently messy, almost willfully bad movies, but Hardy’s performance has been a strangely compelling one-body buddy comedy. It’s one thing to throw a cape on and jump the sky. It’s another to run manically through the desert with an alien voice inside barking, as Eddie’s inner-alien does in the new “Venom: The Last Dance,” “Engage your core,” “Nice horsey” and “Tequila!”

The biggest dichotomy of these movies, though, isn’t the Eddie-symbiote split. It’s the contrast between Hardy’s funny, sometimes oddly touching performance and all of the CGI mess around him. There were moments of fun in the first two movies, but if “The Last Dance,” which opens in theaters Thursday, is the swan song for this spun-off, half-formed franchise, it confirms that the “Venom” films never quite figured themselves out.