Watching Venom: The Last Dance is like watching the superhero genre die for two hours. Right in front of you. Hold your hand. Holding on to his last bit of dignity. It doesn’t want to go. But eventually it realizes it’s time. The light goes out of his eyes. Even the end credits stinger is sad and lonely.

This really was a shitty year for superhero movies. The only major blockbuster, Deadpool and Wolverine, was a masturbating exercise in embarrassing self-promotion and had more in common with the old That’s Entertainment musical clip shows than a traditional feature film. “Joker: Folie a Deux” was angry at its own audience for giving a crap about the Joker from the start, and ended up nailing its own coffin shut. Then there’s “Madame Web,” which was considered sloppy and modest at the start of the year, but was a harmless little thing compared to what came after.

The only great superhero movie this year was Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, an independent, queer, punk rock take on Batman’s famous villains that exists in direct defiance of a studio system that would never try so hard to be so personal or anything cross many boundaries. The closest the studios ever came was “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” a superhero movie about dueling polyamorous throuples who eat people’s heads and ultimately perish through a lack of commitment to the polycule.

“Venom: The Last Dance” has no such imagination, eschewing what made the other “Venom” films entertaining and replacing it with plot. Because that’s what people loved about these films. The plot. A few funny moments and a few strange scenes involving the Venom symbiote merging with random animals are all we get from the lobster-soaked craziness of the first two films. And it’s clear that at some point the filmmakers realized that these animals were the film’s biggest selling point, as the end credits are full of animals in Venom suits that didn’t appear in the film (but obviously should have).

The third “Venom” begins with a villain shouting his backstory to the audience. His name is Knull, he created the Venom symbiotes, and he looks like a Final Fantasy villain that got lost and ended up in the wrong franchise. He too remains lost. Knull spends the entire film in a generic and poorly lit CGI cutscene, never interacting with the characters, and building teleportation portals for his evil minions to search the universe for a way to free Knull from this prison. This prison… where all he does is build teleportation portals. Correct.

Eddie Brock and his gooey lover Venom (both played by Tom Hardy) haven’t moved since we last saw them. They’re still sitting in a bar getting drunk while all the other superheroes are having a multiverse adventure. “I’m so done with this multiverse shit,” Venom shouts before turning back to his own business. Eddie is a fugitive from the law accused of murdering Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham), who is actually alive and in a secret government facility beneath Area 51 with another symbiote. The underground version is actually called Area 55 – probably for reasons.

So Eddie decides to blackmail a corrupt judge into dropping his charges, which he apparently succeeds in, and they transport him to New York City. This plot goes nowhere. On the way, one of Knull’s monsters attacks them and Venom realizes that the key to freeing Knull lies in their bodies because they died once. Don’t even try to find out. Now they have to escape from the cops (who never show up), from the government (which sucks so much), and from Knull’s monsters, who have some kind of wood chipper in their skull, which is admittedly a little cool.

“Venom: The Last Dance” is a road trip refugee film that barely works as a road trip, refugee film or film. The whole plot revolves around Eddie and Venom, who cannot merge into one or they will be killed by Knull’s monsters. So they avoid merging at all costs until Venom decides he wants to dance and throws caution to the wind for reasons that make no sense. The scene ends exactly as you would expect.

If writer/director Kelly Marcel’s film (Tom Hardy has a “story” credit) had committed to just goofing around, it might have been entertainingly bad. The film’s best moments are certainly the ones where it remembers that the other films were weird, and it tries to be weird too. There’s a sing-along in a car with Rhys Ifans’ hippie family – another subplot that goes nowhere despite taking up tons of screen time – and it’s almost charming. Venom taking over a fish and a frog is, as mentioned, kind of cute.

But the majority of these meandering snorers think we care about government conspiracies and alien hierarchies. Neither of these matters in the long run, because it all boils down to this: “Symbiotes are good, Knull’s monsters are evil.” Marcel introduces us to supporting characters with a special characteristic – not per character, but as a whole – and they are usually shown together all the unnecessary exposition thrown into the wood chipper. Juno Temple plays a scientist who remembers her brother being struck by lightning and that sort of but not really comes up later, and Chiwetel Ejiofor plays some sort of generic “soldier who just wants to shoot things” and you wonder if the actor is still paying off his student loans. It’s hard to imagine what else might have attracted him to the role.

“Venom: The Last Dance” really wants you to think it’s the end. Throughout the film, Venom talks about wanting to see the Statue of Liberty like a cop with two weeks until retirement, and about taking his wife on a long-delayed boat trip right after a final case. There’s a suggestion for a sequel, but it seems more like a threat: “If you see this movie, you’ll watch another one.” So maybe let’s not do that. If Sony thinks this is what the Venom movies should look like, they can keep it. What a lousy way to say goodbye. No greatest hits. Just a strikeout.

“Venom: The Last Dance,” a Sony Pictures release, opens exclusively in theaters on October 25.