When the first Venom film was released in 2018, with talented Brit Tom Hardy in the lead role, audiences appeared to be drawn by the quirky antihero from the Marvel comics, and it did rather well at the box office because of it, taking in over $850 million worldwide.

And although the second one -Venom: Let There be Carnage didn’t impress as much, its $500 million takings was enough to secure that the character got a trilogy, albeit a final entry.

But does this instalment have any bite left?

We rejoin Eddie Brock (Hardy) and his symbiote pal Venom (voiced by Hardy), where we last found them, in a bar in Mexico on Earth 616. They are soon transported, rather conveniently, back to our Earth, and although glad to be back, they still find themselves the number one suspect for the murder of Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham). So they decide the best thing to do is make their way over to NYC and try to clear their name.

What they’re unaware of however, is that they are carrying a codex, and an evil force on the other side of the universe wants it, so sends out creatures to hunt them down, and retrieve it any way possible, which just may case a few bump in the roads on their road trip.

You would think the this entry would be in fairly safe hands, written as it is by British writer Kelly Marcel, who had a hand in scribing the previous two films in the series.

Unfortunately, Marcel also makes her directorial debut here, and it’s quite a messy affair. She struggles with pacing throughout, which is her own doing, deciding to include a number of unnecessary scenes; for instance, one that takes place in a campervan, where all the passengers are encouraged to sing David Bowie’s Space Oddity for way longer than needed. Another is a dance sequence that takes place in Vegas. It would be fine if they were entertaining in themselves, but they’re far from it, and just prevent the film from finding its feet, which, it struggles to do throughout.

In fact the main drive of the plot probably takes up no more than 40 minutes of the film, with everything else just being rather dour filling.

Marcel doesn’t see the big picture, as she is easily distracted, moving the narrative with the fluidity of Venom’s movement. The result is an off-putting jumble of a film, lacking one main ingredient – direction.

One thing to her credit is that she includes five British actors in top roles, so as well as Hardy, there’s also Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans and the return of Stephen Graham, who all play Americans incidentally. Perhaps the draw of appearing in a Marvel-ish film (it’s actually released under the banner of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe) was just too great, especially with so many of their British peers littering the MCU in one shape or another, but unfortunately for them, this wasn’t the one to plump for.

It’s a shame because there is a nugget of a good idea at play here, which Marcel should have focused on throughout, which sadly only takes up about fifteen minutes of screen time. Perhaps the fact that Hardy himself gets a co-story credit was more of a hindrance than a help.

And with it taking in the lowest of all three films, it certainly didn’t split the opinion of audiences, who could sense, in a Peter Parker kind of way, to steer clear of it.

It’s disappointing then that this final instalment lacked potency, as well as a director that didn’t know what to do with the character, resulting in, somewhat ironically, a film flailing about consisting of nothing but all arms and legs.