For three films now, Tom Hardy has smothered Jekyll and Hyde in one strange and slimy double act. In a Marvel universe full of alter egos hiding secret superpowers, his investigative journalist Eddie Brock doesn’t transform. He shares his body with an inky alien symbiote (voiced with a baritone growl by Hardy), who sometimes swallows him whole, sometimes shoots out a tentacle or two, and always sharply underlines Eddie’s inner monologue.

These have always been messy, almost deliberately bad films, but Hardy’s performance was strangely convincing one-body buddy comedy. It’s one thing to put on a cape and jump through the air. It’s another to run manically through the desert with an alien voice barking, like Eddie’s inner alien does in the new “Venom: The Last Dance,” “Engage your core,” “Nice horse” and “Tequila!”

The biggest dichotomy of these films, however, isn’t the split between Eddie and symbiote. It’s the contrast between Hardy’s funny, sometimes strangely moving performance and all the CGI junk around him. There were moments of fun in the first two films, but if “The Last Dance,” which opens in theaters Thursday, the swan song for this spun-off, half-formed franchise, it confirms that the “Venom” films never quite figured themselves out.

In “The Last Dance,” Kelly Marcel, co-writer of the first two “Venom” films, takes over as director, following Andy Serkis (“2021 Venom: Let There Be Carnage”) and Ruben Fleischer (“Venom ” from 2018). We rejoin Venom (the fusion of Eddie and his alien soulmate) in Mexico, where they are on the run from the law. But a new threat is also emerging.

The film opens with Knull (Serkis), the creator of the symbiote, dispatching aliens from a dirty, far and dark corner of space to retrieve a ‘codex’ found in Venom’s spine and which, if obtained, will lead to the destruction of both men and women. symbiotes.

To me, delivering a typical comic book-style doomsday scenario is about the last thing a “Venom” movie needs. The best sequences in the first two films are no more complicated than Venom craving lobster or ordering pizza. Smaller stakes are better suited to this twisted comedy. The touchstone for these films shouldn’t be the Marvel playbook, but old episodes of “The Odd Couple.”

Instead, we’re thrown into a near-boring environment of Area 51, where an elaborate laboratory led by Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple) studies the symbiotes it has captured with the help of a military division led by Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor, which gives more emphasis to the film than it deserves). Once the alien insects arrive in search of the codex, there’s plenty of running and fighting, with a UFO-enthusiastic family in a VW bus (Rhys Ifans playing the father) thrown into the mix. The ensuing battle, as the title promises, ultimately threatens to divide Venom for good.

But the promise of the ‘Venom’ series is really that the core Marvel stuff would be less intrusive here. This is a B-movie realm of the multiverse with little appetite for solemnity, nobility, or two-and-a-half-hour running time. They can feel a bit like throwaway knockoffs, which is both their appeal and their frustration.

I kept advocating for the surprisingly lifeless “The Last Dance” to go way back on its save-the-world plot (and its CGI) and lean more on its most powerful effect: Hardy’s split-personality double act. If this is supposed to be the last hurray — which is admittedly a dubious idea for anything remotely related to “Spider-Man” — it’s a shame we never saw more of Venom in real life. After all, Eddie is a journalist. One can only imagine how he and the symbiote would have debated more pressing issues than the fate of the universe, like Oxford commas.

“Venom: The Last Dance,” a Columbia Pictures release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for its intense sequences of violence and action, gory images and strong language. Running time: 110 minutes. Two stars out of four.