Kelly Marcel

In Venom: The Last Dance (2024), Venom wants to see the world and Eddie Brock wants to lie down. Kelly Marcel gives Tom Hardy a useful disagreement to play, with the actor supplying both sides and arguing with his own shoulder. We laughed at their bickering because Eddie's exhaustion makes the alien's appetite for an outing feel like a domestic nuisance. This is where Marcel's writing works: the characters have different wants, and each makes the other's day harder.

Her breakthrough screenplay was Saving Mr. Banks (2013), followed by the E.L. James adaptation Fifty Shades of Grey (2015). The turn towards franchise writing came with Venom (2018), then Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021). By the third film she was directing for the first time, working from a story developed with Hardy.

Fifty Shades of Grey shows how quickly Marcel's interest in relationships can run out of useful things to say. Sam Taylor-Johnson takes Anastasia Steele's curiosity seriously, and Dakota Johnson supplies wit that helps us understand it. Jamie Dornan's fixed seriousness gives Johnson little to provoke, leaving her to supply much of the couple's interest herself. Marcel gives the pair plenty to discuss about their proposed arrangement, but the dialogue grows less revealing as it accumulates. We need to feel why Anastasia wants this man; further negotiation does not do the job.

Venom: The Last Dance has a better central exchange and scarcely knows when to leave it alone. Marcel and Hardy find a workable comedy in Eddie's wish for peace and Venom's refusal to grant it, particularly when they are simply sitting in a car or at a bar. Then soldiers, scientists and explanations about a codex keep taking over. As director, Marcel gives the supporting plot too much time and the funny pair too little. A smaller comedy with Hardy would interest us more than another set of alien instructions.