Venom’s trajectory in the cinema has always desperately depended on our complicity. It has been this way since, in 2007, the encounter of the alien symbiote with Peter Parker – and later with Eddie Brock – gave way to a Tobey Maguire with indescribable bangs dancing in a club. jazz. Spider-Man 3 It was an absolute disaster aggravated by an appearance by Venom that the studio had forced Sam Raimi to include, overflowing his film with villains and subplots, but since it was still funny, it began to generate a cult following. This contradiction, in fact, has been another key feature of the cinematic Venom: its materialization through despotic and opportunistic business decisions does not prevent it from generating a very particular appeal.
We saw it more clearly in the Venom. When it was released in October 2018, Tom Hardy’s film seemed completely out of place. Behind him he had the blockbusters of Avengers: Infinity War and Black Panther —the latter a superhero movie that was going to manage to do well at the Oscars— as well as the satire of Deadpool 2and ahead—it would be released a couple of months later— Aquaman. At that time, DC had decided to give up a defined style in its universe after the disagreements with Zack Snyder, something that the public blessed with more than 1 billion dollars raised. Meantime, Venom nor did it have the solidity of Marvel Studios, nor the calculated audacity of Deadpool, nor the anarchy of Aquaman. And he still made a lot of money.
Venom It made $856 million with almost total critical rejection. The derivative nature of that spectacle was rightly pointed out. The visual effects were painful, the script made no sense, and in general there was an overwhelming lack of conviction in the effort to inaugurate a saga. Such was Sony’s desire: to build a film franchise in the shadow of the Marvel Universe, through secondary characters from the Spider-Man comics. It was such a deceitful move, so much of taking advantage of the crumbs of that superheroic vein on which Hollywood’s finances had come to depend, that this jumped out into the images. Venom It was a weak spectacle, the saddest residual emanation of a cultural landscape that was already beginning to saturate us.
What was the public response? Start joking with the fact that the film directed by Ruben Fleischer was, in reality, a romantic comedy between Eddie Brock (a Hardy, it must be said, quite dedicated to the cause) and the symbiote that took over his body, giving rise to a mostly funny dynamic. Aware of how well this element had gone down, its creators intensified it for the future. And so, foolishly, Venom It could have been a trilogy. Venom: The Last Dancethe third installment and supposed finale, everything is at stake for the public to continue finding this gigantic nonsense endearing.
A purely circumstantial character
TO Venom: The Last DanceLet’s say it now, he has had to deal in a big way with the ominous void that has never stopped hanging over the saga, perhaps infected by the other films that have arrived after the previous one. Venom: There will be carnage —506 million at the end of the pandemic, not bad— to integrate this SSU (Sony’s Spider-Man Universe). Or rather, this Universe of Spider-Man Supporting Characters (UPSS), as we proposed to rename it following Madame Web. A film that, like Morbiuscould not escape the aforementioned void, and resigned itself to failure without being very different in its approach to the Venom. Just a little less skilled at finding complicity.
With Morbius and Madame Web There was also laughter, but they were limited to social networks, to previous memes before the corresponding collapse in theaters. What happened with was especially symptomatic Morbius: In the advanced stages of the debacle, a meme spread, It’s morbin’ time (a phrase that was not said in the film), with enough relish to convince Sony to organize a re-release in the US. It was another failure, which clearly showed the difference between Morbius and Madame Web in front of the Venom: the Venom They have been able to capitalize on the chaotic humor of social networks, unlike the other two films. The symbiote, allied with how well Tom Hardy tends to like, is, therefore, as circumstantial as the other creatures, but it has been luckier.
This may have come from birth. As a comic book character, studying Venom is studying the phase of American superhero comics that, by dint of wanting to be darker and more adult, seemed more ridiculously adolescent. We are talking about the 80s, where the birth of Venom alternated with the most sinister Batman comics —The Killing Joke, Return of the Night Lord— and the most lucid creations of Alan Moore —Swamp Thing, Watchmen—, whose unquestionable quality nevertheless gave way to a lazy fetish for gore. Venom is the best example, linked to a provisional access of the kind Spider-Man to his “dark side” and formed in Eddie Brock as his antithesis, the Lethal Protector.
The Lethal Protector could hardly be considered a villain. She likes to tear off the heads of her enemies, but she is still a hooligan: as cosmetic and superficially “evil” as her black color, her bulky muscles and her grotesque tongue between fangs. Venom is nothing more than a bad guy, and this facet has been soberly respected during his cinematographic career thanks to Sony’s negligence when it comes to making decisions that go beyond designing release calendars. Venom constantly talks about mutilating his enemies and boasts of a cruelty that we only see to the extent that he is certainly toxic company for Eddie Brock. But he does nothing but talk and lick his lips. The PG-13 is not enough.
In Venom: The Last Dance Venom eats a few heads and does it without gore some. It settles for digital blurs initialing its final adventure: the symbiote and Hardy will separate their paths in this film – where Kelly Marcel debuts as a director after having co-written the scripts for the saga with Hardy – and they will do so with a definitive surrender, the letters about the table Because everyone, in the last danceseem aware of having prolonged a sterile and irrelevant phenomenon for six years. There is even some relief at finally finishing it.
What was behind the meme
At a given moment of Venom: The Last Dance The action moves to Las Vegas and Venom starts, well, dancing. He meets an old acquaintance and sounds a remix ABBA’s electronic music promoting a deliberately tacky dance, which lacks a “for your consideration” if this label were dedicated to those who upload viral videos to TikTok and not to the academics who decide the Oscar race. Because that’s what he wants the last dancewhat I wanted Venom: There will be carnage and what I wanted to a greater or lesser extent (there it was a little more accidental) the first Venom. Wink at us. Joke with the absurdity of your scaffolding.
It is a humor that could refer us to Deadpool, although we are not talking about exactly the same thing. Deadpool he jokes from the security of being on top. Deadpool and Wolverine has swept this summer based on an obscene gloating over Disney’s hegemonic position within the industry – having absorbed Fox and yet having the audacity to pay homage to the X-Men whose continuity it has dismantled – while the humor of Venom It comes from a very different place. It is projected from the backroom of an agonizing genre such as superheroes, through a crack where the gentrification of the market encourages nothing to matter too much between multiverses, reboots inexhaustible and even actors who seem as bewildered as the audience.
Venom: The Last Dance It has Chiwetel Ejiofor and Rhys Ifans in the cast. Both have starred in Marvel movies before: Ejiofor is Mordo in the adventures of Doctor Strange and Ifans was the Lizard in the Amazing Spider-Man by Andrew Garfield. It is assumed that these deliveries integrate a continuity foreign to Venom So there is no inconsistency as such, but it is still strange and aggravates the stinging feeling that this has been going on for a while without giving more of itself. The UPSS, as thankless as its articulation is, has had to serve as a scapegoat while Marvel Studios tries to get out of its slump —Deadpool and Wolverine aims to have achieved it—and DC Studios awaits a remodeling with the superman by James Gunn. Its defects are, in short, not very far from the norm of these productions, but they shine much more.
In the last dance They shine above all because the fun has evaporated, and occurrences like the aforementioned dance or the symbiote horse—completely blown up in the trailers—only seem like desperate attempts to generate memes. The thing is even more serious because, on the one hand, Venom 3 adds several satellite characters around Venom-Hardy —Ejiofor alongside Juno Temple’s scientist, immersed in exhausting dialogues to explain an inexplicable plot—, and on the other hand, she sees the need to become nostalgic to convince the public that she has not lost time watching these stupid movies, now that their feint story reaches its conclusion.
the last dance tries to gather emotion and twilight romanticism when saying goodbye to its characters, with some interesting detours on paper – the case of Ifans and his family crossing Brock’s path – quickly aborted by the inanity of everything built until now. There is no way to genuinely move from what has only been a joke that we could quickly forget about by making scroll, and the last dance He discovers it in real time. That’s why the film is boring and irritating, and rather than ending with a pretense of organic closure, it does so with obvious exhaustion.
An exhaustion, moreover, capable of leading to anguish. Because in a few weeks it will be released Kraven the Hunternew addition to the horrifying-looking UPSS, and because Hardy says that this does not have to be a definitive farewell for Venom. Maybe in the future he will finally face Spider-Man, or something like that. The UPSS is going to bury superhero cinema. It’s going to bury us all.
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