Tom Hardy’s agreeably silly Marvel franchise wraps things up in a patchy final adventure that needed a tighter, and funnier, script

The recent, long-awaited, cratering of the superhero movie (with a notable Deadpool-sized exception) has led to a mad scramble – release dates pushed, marketing strategies tweaked, Robert Downey Jr bribed – and a concerned question mark over what the future might hold for Hollywood’s most commercially lucrative contemporary genre. The Venom franchise, which launched in 2018 to surprise success, had already felt like a throwback to an earlier time – a glossy and light-hearted burst of mid-00s nostalgia – but now, with its third and final chapter releasing at such a fraught time, it also feels like a reminder of a more recent time when these films used to mean more to audiences.

Whether or not something like Venom: The Last Dance will jolt enough of a response remains to be seen (the second film saw a $350m drop at the global box office and the third is tracking for a franchise-low opening) but it’s at least a smartly planned conclusion to an inoffensively silly and low-stakes series, Tom Hardy and his quippy alien symbiote leaping off a sinking ship with a spring in their step. It’s not as catastrophic as Madame Web or as redundant as The Marvels or as annoying as Deadpool & Wolverine, it’s just about passable in a throwaway kinda way, blessed by a surprisingly brief runtime that doesn’t allow it to grate or exhaust. If only it amused and excited us a little bit more.