Venom: The Last Dance begins the way so many promising movies do — with the villain explaining what his deal is in an opening monologue that was clearly added in because either test audiences or studio executives found him too confusing. The thing is, it’s no less confusing for being laid out in flat terms over a montage of Frank Frazetta-y imagery of a savage fantasy wilderness. Knull, played by Andy Serkis, is a godlike figure who apparently predates the universe, and who created and then was betrayed and imprisoned by the race of alien symbiotes that Venom belongs to. In the movie, he manifests as a mass of dirty blond hair hunched in the middle of a swamp. As Venom: The Last Dance progresses, and it becomes clear that Knull is going to remain in that swamp while dispatching portal-hopping spider-lizard-monster things to do his bidding, you might start to get that sinking feeling that accompanies so much late-period superhero universe fare, when you realize that half of the shit happening on screen is in service to some future installment that may or may not ever arrive. Venom: The Last Dance is supposed to be the end of a trilogy — it’s right there in the title — and yet it floats some future big bad seemingly out of habit, like the need to never resolve things is a feature and not a bug of these movies, a promise that next time, things will actually get good.
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