Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple and Rhys Ifans also star in the interspecies bromance, which pits the central duo against a deadly threat from the alien’s home planet.

Over the course of three Venom movies, Tom Hardy has done a lot to bring a modicum of gravitas to a profoundly silly story about a parasitic alien whose place in the Marvel universe cosmology has never made a lot of sense. At least to those not schooled in all things MCU. The fact that the trilogy has avoided taking itself too seriously has been both its saving grace and its limitation. It’s hard to invest too much in the usual bombast and mayhem and CG smackdowns when the films come off as goofball larks with way fewer teeth than the giant pointed chompers on the title character.

Graduating from her role as a writer and producer on 2018’s Venom and 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage to first-time feature director here, Kelly Marcel jettisons any Spider-Man adjacency and tries her hand at something no one on the preceding films has managed to do. Working from a story she developed with Hardy, Marcel gives Venom — as the goopy alien organism that took up residence in the body of Hardy’s former investigative TV reporter Eddie Brock is known — an origin story of sorts.

But Knull doesn’t just want those ingrate offspring slaughtered. He needs a key in their possession to escape his prison. “Find me the Codex!” he bellows at the critters. Of course, the Codex is not to be found on any random symbiote. No prizes for guessing who has it.

The story picks up with Eddie and Venom drunk in a bar in Mexico, having gone on the run after eliminating Woody Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady and his symbiote, Carnage, in the last movie. Their epic clash apparently alerted Knull to the presence of symbiotes on Earth. An irrelevant multiverse detour lands Eddie and Venom back in the bar some time later, primarily so the symbiote can manipulate his host into channeling Tom Cruise in Cocktail — with those slithery extra limbs doing maximum damage to the tune of “Tequila,” naturally.

Venom jumping in on the sole lyric of that 1950s jazz instrumental is a good indication of what’s to come, as Hardy and Marcel milk the odd-couple dynamic and jokey banter for maximum laughs. The symbiote at this point is so playful and quippy he’s practically Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, minus the urge to eat his one true friend. But Venom sobers up in every sense of the word as the story progresses, pointing toward what seems an inevitable separation of host and guest and yielding moments of tender sentimentality.

They turn out to be near Area 51, a recently decommissioned site about to be destroyed, where the government has been conducting controversial tests on aliens. In a secret containment facility 100 feet below the surface, where something called the Imperium Program is being carried out, a couple of thin secondary characters are introduced, played by over-qualified actors not given enough to do.

One is Army Special Forces brass Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and the other is symbiote whisperer scientist Dr. Payne (Juno Temple). Dr. Payne believes the aliens have come to Earth fleeing something and looking for a safe haven, but Strickland is convinced their goal is migration and planetary occupation.

UFO-obsessed hippie tourist Martin (Rhys Ifans) and his family give Eddie a lift in their camper van along the Extraterrestrial Highway, where they’re hoping to see some alien action. They get more than they bargained for once a xenophage sniffs out Venom, and Knull sends a whole lot more of them to clean up. And to bring back that damn Codex — not to be confused with the identically termed but narratively unrelated Codex that Michael Shannon’s General Zod was screaming for in Man of Steel.