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, currently in Taiwan theaters, is the swan song for this spun-off, half-formed franchise, it confirms that the Venom films never quite figured themselves out.
Photo: AP
In The Last Dance, Kelly Marcel, co-writer of the first two Venom films, takes over directing, following Andy Serkis (2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage) and Ruben Fleischer (2018’s Venom). We rejoin Venom (the fusion of Eddie and his alien-entity soulmate) in Mexico where they’re on the run from the law. But a new threat is also emerging.
The movie opens with Knull (Serkis), the symbiote creator who, from some icky distant and dark corner of space, dispatches aliens to retrieve a “codex” found within Venom’s spine that, if obtained, will lead to the annihilation of both humans and symbiotes.
To me, bringing a typical comic book-style doomsday plot is about the last thing a Venom movie needs. The best sequences in the first two movies are no more complicated than Venom craving lobster or ordering pizza. Smaller stakes better suit its warped comedy. The touchstone for these movies shouldn’t be the Marvel playbook but old episodes of The Odd Couple.
Photo: AP
Instead, we’re thrown into a pretty immediately boring Area 51 setting where an elaborate lab headed by Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple) studies the symbiotes it has trapped with the help of a military division led by Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor, lending more gravitas to the movie than it deserves). Once the alien insect things arrive seeking the codex, there’s plenty of running and fighting, with a UFO-enthusiast family in a VW bus (Rhys Ifans plays the dad) thrown into the mix. The ensuing battle ultimately, as the title promises, threatens to divide Venom for good.
But the promise of the Venom series, really, is that the mainline Marvel stuff would intrude less here. This is a B-movie realm of the multiverse with little appetite for solemnity, nobility or two-and-half-hour running times. They can feel a little like tossed-off knockoffs, which is both their appeal and their frustration.
I kept rooting for the surprisingly lifeless The Last Dance to pull way back on its save-the-world plot (and its CGI) and lean more into its most potent effect: Hardy’s split-personality double act. If this is to be a last hurrah — which, granted is a dubious idea for anything even adjacently connected to Spider-Man — it’s a shame that we never saw more of Venom in daily life. Eddie is a journalist after all. One can only imagine how he and the symbiote might have debated more pressing concerns than the fate of the universe, like Oxford commas.
Photo: AP
May 26 to June 1 When the Qing Dynasty first took control over many parts of Taiwan in 1684, it roughly continued the Kingdom of Tungning’s administrative borders (see below), setting up one prefecture and three counties. The actual area of control covered today’s Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The administrative center was in Taiwan Prefecture, in today’s Tainan. But as Han settlement expanded and due to rebellions and other international incidents, the administrative units became more complex. By the time Taiwan became a province of the Qing in 1887, there were three prefectures, eleven counties, three subprefectures and one directly-administered prefecture, with
It’s an enormous dome of colorful glass, something between the Sistine Chapel and a Marc Chagall fresco. And yet, it’s just a subway station. Formosa Boulevard is the heart of Kaohsiung’s mass transit system. In metro terms, it’s modest: the only transfer station in a network with just two lines. But it’s a landmark nonetheless: a civic space that serves as much more than a point of transit. On a hot Sunday, the corridors and vast halls are filled with a market selling everything from second-hand clothes to toys and house decorations. It’s just one of the many events the station hosts,
Two moves show Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) is gunning for Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) party chair and the 2028 presidential election. Technically, these are not yet “officially” official, but by the rules of Taiwan politics, she is now on the dance floor. Earlier this month Lu confirmed in an interview in Japan’s Nikkei that she was considering running for KMT chair. This is not new news, but according to reports from her camp she previously was still considering the case for and against running. By choosing a respected, international news outlet, she declared it to the world. While the outside world
Through art and storytelling, La Benida Hui empowers children to become environmental heroes, using everything from SpongeBob to microorganisms to reimagine their relationship with nature. “I tell the students that they have superpowers. It needs to be emphasized that their choices can make a difference,” says Hui, an environmental artist and education specialist. For her second year as Badou Elementary’s artist in residence, Hui leads creative lessons on environmental protection, where students reflect on their relationship with nature and transform beach waste into artworks. Standing in lush green hills overlooking the ocean with land extending into the intertidal zone, the school in Keelung