The alien gets the good lines, and Tom Hardy completes his mumblemouth Bowery Boy peformance, in a sequel that's as fun, and rote, as the others.

The alien gets the good lines, and Tom Hardy completes his mumblemouth Bowery Boy peformance, in a sequel that's as fun, and rote, as the others.

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…

The Spidey-adjacent fan favorite finishes out his trilogy with the usual buddy-comedy-meets-blockbuster spectacle, some laughs, and fan sentimentality.

'It's been one of the best things I've ever done in my life, so it'll be sad to see him go.'

Venom: The Last Dance is a rushed, clumsy, lackluster trilogy finale that forgets to embrace the established fun of the franchise. Here's our review.