In Review: 'Venom: The Last Dance,' 'Woman of the Hour'

In theaters, a Spider-Man-adjacent trilogy comes to a close. On streaming, Anna Kendrick offers a fresh perspective on a serial killer story.

Venom: The Last Dance
Dir. Kelly Marcel
109 min.

When someone writes the definitive history of this franchise-driven era of Hollywood filmmaking, Sony's attempts to create a bunch of movies featuring supporting characters from Spider-Man comics will surely provide fodder for one of its strangest chapters. Seemingly driven by the desire to bring something, anything, superhero or superhero-adjacent to the big screen but limited by whatever byzantine rights and power-sharing agreement are currently in effect with Marvel, Sony has built movies around Venom, Morbius, Madame Web, and, coming next year, Kraven the Hunter. Of these, only Venom comes close to being a household name outside comic book-reading circles, or to working as a character who doesn’t have to play a foil to Spider-Man.

That might explain why Venom and its first sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage have been the only watchable movies of this bad batch. More likely, however, is the decision to let those films be alternately silly and sentimental buddy comedies first, effects-filled action blockbusters second. Yes, they tell the story of an alien symbiote who lands on Earth and has to dispatch a variety of bad guys. But it’s also the story of dorky, down-on-his-luck investigative reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom (also Hardy), the surprisingly sensitive head-eating best friend with whom he shares a body. In their best moments, arguably their only good moments, the Venom films forget about all the action blockbuster nonsense and focus on other sorts of nonsense instead.

That tendency reached its peak with the 2021 film Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which, unburdened by the need to tell an origin story, gave a lot of space to scenes with Eddie coaxing Venom into eating chickens instead of humans, only to be told that Venom could not possibly eat the cute chickens that he’d given names or Eddie trying to be mature and accept that his ex-fiancée Anne (Michelle Williams) has, indeed, moved on while Venom, acting as a kind of extraterrestrial id, refused to accept her choices.

Unfortunately, despite featuring a scene in which Venom dances to a cover of “Dancing Queen,” Venom: The Last Dance rarely lets itself be so loose or fun. And, more unfortunately still, that means it ends up being not much of anything beyond another second-tier superhero movie. 

Picking up where Spider-Man: No Way Home left off, the film  finds Eddie briefly hanging out in the mainline MCU before being sucked back into his own universe ,where Eddie/Venom soon discover they have two problems: Eddie’s a wanted fugitive due to the events of the previous film and Venom’s the subject of a similar manhunt (symbiote-hunt?), having pissed off Knull (Andy Serkis), the source of all symbiote life. Or something. The film doesn’t really explain things that clearly. But it does feature a lot of scenes setting up a tragic backstory for Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple), even though that character ends up being only a marginal player in the action and many scenes in which Eddie hangs out with a family of hippies/UFO true believers headed by Rhys Ifans and Alanna Ubach, including one in which Ifans’ character leads a torturous, endless singalong of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”

The directorial debut of Kelly Marcel—co-writer of the first film and the sole credited screenwriter of its successors, sharing a story credit with Hardy on both—Venom: The Last Dance struggles to find a reason to exist apart from the forces of box office momentum that have willed it into existence. Its comic moments are strained, its action scenes are boilerplate, and if you were intrigued by the shots of Venom taking over the body of a horse or playing a slot machine in the trailer, rest assured that you’ve pretty much already seen them in full. Maybe Venom was destined to be a B-lister all along. Take a seat on the bench next to Madame Web, big guy. —Keith Phipps

Theaters nationwide begin serving as host as host bodies for Venom: The Last Dance tonight.

Woman of the Hour
Dir. Anna Kendrick
95 min.

Most women will never have to encounter a man like Rodney Alcala, the so-called “Dating Game Killer,” a serial killer who sexually assaulted his victims and may have murdered over 100 women, though he was ultimately convicted of only seven. Yet they can expect to deal with “nice guy” types like Terry (Pete Holmes), a struggling actor in 1978 Los Angeles who lives in the same apartment building as Cheryl, played by Anna Kendrick, who’s new to town and also looking for a big break in Hollywood. They run lines together and have the occasional drink, though Cheryl is wary of Terry, because he wants something more from her and she’s not particularly interested. When he finally does make his move at a bar and doesn’t get the response he wants, Terry doesn’t react well and Cheryl mollifies him, insisting that they’re friends and they have another drink together. Cut to the next morning and there’s Terry sleeping next to her in her bed. 

Terry is not a killer and is not the type to cross any firm lines a woman like Cheryl might draw for him. But in Woman of the Hour, Kendrick’s fascinating if schematic directorial debut, he’s one of the mines in the bachelorette landscape. There are eerie parallels that emerge between the language Cheryl uses to salve Terry’s bruised ego and the tactics one of Alcala’s victims uses to convince him not to murder her. The film suggests that single women have to develop a battery of defense mechanisms to fend off different forms of aggressive yet easily wounded men just to keep from getting hurt by them. Kendrick and her screenwriter, Ian McDonald, go to great lengths to use the uncommon story of a serial killer to tell the more common story of women navigating a world of toxic men. 

To that end, Kendrick and McDonald scramble the timeline and take liberties with the Alcala case that other fact-based thrillers wouldn’t. The real Alcala appeared as “Bachelor #1” on The Dating Game in 1978 and won after answering the show’s typical battery of inane, flirty questions more convincingly than the other two lunkheads on offer. (His appearance is on YouTube.) The real Cheryl reportedly declined to follow through on her date with Alcala because she found him too creepy, which seems like a common outcome on a show where people were looking more for TV exposure than a love connection. That’s certainly the case with movie Cheryl, whose agent books her on The Dating Game after a series of whiffed auditions, and she does wind up spending part of an evening with Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), who presents himself as a well-connected photographer. 

Woman of the Hour follows some of Alcala’s exploits, especially his seduction of a teenage runaway (Autumn Best) he cajoles into modeling for him, but it’s an unusually and ambitiously structured film that unfolds more like a tangle of episodes. Kendrick and McDonald are running through various male types: The “Nice Guy” type like Terry, who’s familiar from stories like “Cat Person” or the babe-dot-com #MeToo piece on Aziz Ansari; the “Basically Okay” type like the boyfriend of Laura (Nicolette Robinson), a woman in the studio audience, who doesn’t get enough support from him when she recognizes Alcala as the creep stalking a beach party on the night her friend was killed; and then there are the standard-issue sexist jerks, like the cops who give Laura the runaround and Tony Hale’s smarmy game-show host. 

Once Woman of the Hour takes shape as a thesis, it grows disappointingly flat, as the individual stories start to feel like the body of a five-paragraph essay on sexism. But there are moments when Kendrick shows flashes of real promise as a director, like a sequence where Cheryl and Alcala meet on the studio backlot after the taping and he persuades her to join him for a drink at a nearby tiki bar. Alcala may be able to work his dark magic on other young women, but Cheryl has the right read on him pretty quickly and spends the rest of their time together trying deftly to untangle herself from the situation. She cannot know or expect under any circumstances what Alcala is capable of doing, but she feels uncomfortable. Kendrick lives in that tension for a while. Every woman does. — Scott Tobias

Woman of the Hour is currently streaming on Netflix.