VENOM: THE LAST DANCE ★★

(M) 109 minutes

You can get used to anything, I suppose. The opening of Venom: The Last Dance finds one-time reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) dressed as a beach bum and slumped at a bar counter in Mexico, where he’s on the run following the events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

Eddie isn’t thrilled with how his life has turned out, nor is he getting along especially well with Venom, the wisecracking alien parasite (or “symbiote”) with whom he’s fused. But his manner is irritable rather than outright distressed: he’s grown accustomed to Venom’s company, and there are times when it helps to be able to morph into a black-tentacled monster and have your enemies for lunch.

That spirit of resignation is all over The Last Dance, which is billed as the final instalment of the Venom trilogy and feels like a contractual obligation for nearly everyone concerned. Writer-director Kelly Marcel has come up with the vaguest possible semblance of a plot, just enough to launch Eddie and Venom on a road trip across the Nevada desert towards New York (Venom, as a recent immigrant to the US, wants to see the Statue of Liberty).

That leaves scope for encounters with friends old and new, including a hippie family of UFO-spotters headed by Rhys Ifans as the benignly obsessive dad. There’s also a stop-off in Vegas, occasioning a brief dance sequence and some slapstick involving slot machines.

But all of this is marking time until we get to Area 51, where Chiwetel Ejiofor and Juno Temple are among the scientists on exposition duty – not that human characters are of great importance to the climax, yet another digitally animated tussle between Venom and others of his extra-terrestrial kind.

Like many recent comic-book franchises from Deadpool to Guardians of the Galaxy, the Venom series is built on a jolting mix of tones – functioning as body horror and buddy comedy in one, with a hint of transgressive romance buried not too deeply in the subtext.