Venom: The Last Dance

I have been kind of hot and cold with the Venom franchise (I hated the first one but I enjoyed the relationship between Eddie and Venom in the second one) so I was eager to see where I would land with Venom: The Last Dance.  I saw it with my nephew last night and I think it has a lot of heart but the story is a mess.  After the battle with Carnage, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is now on the run from General Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who, along with Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple), is trying to capture all of the symbiotes in order to study them at an underground lab below Area 51 and Venom discovers that he is being hunted by a Xenophage, a symbiote sent by an imprisoned deity named Knull (Andy Serkis), in order to capture a Codex that was created within Eddie and Venom that can free him (we learn all of this from lots of stilted exposition dumps).  Several battles with both Strickland and the Xenophage ensue before Eddie and Venom are helped by a family of hippies, led by Martin Moon (Rhys Ifans) and his wife Nova (Alanna Ubach), on their way to Area 51 in search of aliens.  Venom eventually realizes that there is only one way to defeat the Xenophage and this leads to an epic confrontation at Area 51.  The narrative has multiple plot holes and plot contrivances but, even worse, there are several extended sequences that are essentially meaningless fillers, including a sing-along to "Space Oddity" with the hippie family and a dance sequence between Venom and Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), who just happens to be in Las Vegas, to "Dancing Queen."  The action set pieces in the third act are exciting but it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between all of the different symbiotes set loose from the lab who are fighting multiple Xenophages sent by Knull and, at one point, I groaned out loud because it is obvious that much of it is in service of setting up future characters.  The highlight of this installment is, once again, the relationship between Eddie and Venom, which includes several incredibly poignant moments culminating in a montage of all of their exploits set to "Memories" by Maroon 5, and Hardy is as goofy as ever as the straight man to Venom's comedy.  This ranks above Venom but below Venom: Let There Be Carnage for me but I suspect people will like it more than I did.

Note:  There is a mid-credits scene and a post-credits scene (but they are both a bit anticlimactic).