"Let There Be Carnage" had the right idea when it eschewed an extinction-level villain in favor of Woody Harrelson playing a serial killer named Cletus, but Kelly Marcel's "Venom: The Last Dance" - which finds the series' longtime screenwriter matching the same run-and-gun raggedness that directors Andy Serkis and Ruben Fleischer brought to these movies before her - cheats back towards the generic superhero crap that Eddie Brock and his extraterrestrial bestie had largely managed to avoid,

Tom Hardy, from the first "Venom" on, has chosen to offset the uncoolness of doing a comic-book franchise by putting his slumming in quotation marks, playing Eddie as a borderline doofus who talks like a grown-up version of one of the Bowery Boys.

Venom: The Last Dance is another movie failing to fulfill the promise of a monster-style superhero embodied by a disheveled Tom Hardy.