My legs were broken, a film essay by Sean Miguel Maher

Venom is a film really about nothing. I think anything it might mimic a meaning but its subverted by the the performance of Tom Hardy. I love Tom Hardy’s performance in this movie. He has a strangely child like demeanor. The film itself feels like what a child would create about the comic book character Venom. Completely forgetting about tone and style. It reminds me of older comic book adaptations where no one really took anything serious or they took it too seriously. Comic book films especially from Disney’s Marvel have found a tone. Somewhere between joking and serious. The important moments of those films are serious but they ask each actor to give an at least lightly comedic performance. Because often it feels like there is an insecurity in the material. That we shouldn’t take these things too seriously because DOI they are comic books. I think this makes the films repetitious. They don’t get enough of their own independent tone. They don’t get to live as their own films.

Venom feels unique among modern comic book movies even if it relies on a comic book and comic book tropes. Venom is like an advertisement in Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop. It is a movie that feels like someone’s paycheck. It’s a comedy and when it tries to take itself seriously the movie becomes forgettable. Company doing bad thing because company is bad. At one point Tom Hardy hops in an aquarium to cool down and starts eating the lobsters in the tank. It’s crass it’s stupid. It’s one of the best scenes in the movie. I make the Verhoeven connection just because it feels like a facsimile of a movie. It was made and released like a regular movie but it is a rouse. In the way many bad films are but also I can tell that Tom Hardy enjoyed this performance. He got to act like a little boy in a grown man’s body and he had fun with it.

Part of my like for this film comes from a mythologization by me and my friends. We watched it a lot. We were obsessed with the film. Me and one friend in particular changed our online identities to match the film. I am not impartial. I will forever love this movie for these personal reasons.

I feel like if I was a venom fan who saw him as bad ass I would feel cheated by this movie a bit but honestly I don’t care about the venom comic books but this movie. I’ll take it. Thank you, Sony’s Marvel’s Venom’s cast and crew.

Now let me start on the sequel…