Venom: The Last Dance (Kelly Marcel, 2024)

The last dance, eh? If wishes were horses...still, surely an actor of Tom Hardy's calibre must have made enough sponds from this by now to return to proper acting. As it is, instalment three of the franchise continues with more of the same, the human stuck with an alien symbiote inside him trying to evade both the U.S. military and also a host of monsters sent by an imprisoned evil deity to get a key to his prison from inside the protagonist. So, this means numerous chases and messy CGI fight after fight, and would be utterly joyless if it wasn't for the leavening effect of the continuous squabbling and banter between the tired human host and his hedonistic, casually brutal and foul-mouthed symbiote. It's enough to get you through, but only just.

5/10

Thunderbolts* (Jake Schreier, 2025)

Film number 36, and if it isn't stopped, the size of the MCU will eventually overtake that of the real universe. Taking a cue from the overall failure of Eternals, a team composed only of ridiculously superpowered individuals, Thunderbolts* instead serves up a bunch of bickering misfits with virtually no powers at all. The villain is also not powered, but the scheming director of the CIA, seeking to weaponise a mentally unstable man her researchers have imbued with godlike abilities so that he can serve both as a PR figurehead and a one-man replacement for the now defunct Avengers as Earth's protector. This also means doing away with the titular crew since they know all about her self-serving schemes.

Naturally a torrent of chases and blurry fight sequences must fill the bulk of the running time, but there is also plenty of humour deprecating genre cliches, a reasonable stab at drawing parallels between the villain's motives and Trump's world of toxic propraganda, and Florence Pugh, flavour of the month though she might be, again producing a commanding performance as the conflicted de facto leader of the protagonists.

Still a bit of a mess, but a step in the right direction at least.

5/10