Morbius

It's 2022, and Sony continues making blockbusters that belong in the mid-2000s scrap heap.

There is something fascinating about the way Sony Pictures has approached their recent blockbusters, particularly those belonging to their outcast, backwards, Spider-Manless Spider-Man franchise. With the webhead himself on loan to Marvel Studios, Sony has turned to his villains for milking. And milk they have.

After two successful (financially, if not creatively) Venom films, Sony has made the baffling jump from the Spidey Villain A-Team to the Junior Varsity 2nd-stringer Morbius the Living Vampire.

Why? It's anyone’s guess.

Dr. Micharl Morbius is a brilliant biologist who has invented artificial blood and saved countless lives, yet remains afflicted by a rare blood disease, the cure for which lies nebulously beyond his grasp. He turns to splicing bat DNA into his own, and gains superpowers and a thirst for blood. His childhood best friend Milo (or is is Lucien?), played by Matt Smith, suffers a similar affliction, and upon discovering Michael's treatment, self-administers. But he lacks the moral inhibitions Michael has about killing people and sucking them dry. So they have to fight. That's basically it.

What's more interesting than the story is Sony’s continued filmmaking philosophy toward their comic book movies, which seems to be on-par with how studios approached such properties in the ‘90s and 2000s. The movies are simultaneously too slick and polished to seem real, and yet too tonally grey and grimy to feel like celebrations of the vibrant comics they're adapting. They feature neither believable characters nor memorable, high-flying spectacle. They seemingly exist simply to float a brand.

What saved the Venom films, despite still being products of this obsolete approach, was their sheer weirdness. Tom Hardy’s commitment to the silly psychological warfare between Eddie Brock and the Venom symbiote living inside him makes for countless hilarious, strange interactions and physical comedy. The movies function best at their dumbest because it seems knowing. They may not know how to be compelling comic book action-adventure films, but they know when they’re laughably dumb, and they lean into it.

Morbius lacks this strange charm. The Jared Leto vehicle is more a blank-faced, mechanical shrug of genre conventions than it is a whirlwind dumpster fire—though it does have its moments of numbingly stupid grandeur. Leto himself barely seems interested, coming across as emotionally vacant during any scene that doesn’t require him to at least pretend to be in physical agony.

The film is clearly edited down to the bone, too, hobbled together from incongruous takes by people with different ideas of how the scene should play. This makes it so that almost every scene is only minimally coherent, thanks to the regurgitation of plot and dialogue clichés that we, the audience, are conditioned to understand by watching decades of movies. Any scene taken on its own merits and internal logic begins to fall apart, though they can be superficially accepted as functioning sequences once your eyes glaze over at the banal stupidity.

It ultimately winds up feeling more like a facsimile of a film than an actual one—a vague memory of a blockbuster you saw in the mid-2000s but have since forgotten about, until you come across it while doomscrolling to the end of your least-used streaming service's long list of bargain-bin garbage. Seeing its thumbnail image and user rating fills you with existential dread. But you have chosen to hit ‘Play’ anyway. You’re not well.

Leto and the rest of the cast are given no help from the barebones script or assembly-line direction, though it’s hard to tell who is really at fault at any given moment in a film this over-edited.

The action is too blurry, fast, and stylized to be meaningful or memorable, except when the speed ramps down to near freeze frame to show you… the characters getting ready to attack one another? You barely see any of the actual impacts.

With no real characterization, a contrived and hackneyed plot, and incomprehensible action, Morbius simply exists. An undead corpse of an outdated blockbuster that never really lived in its previous life, but is now reanimated thanks to filmmaking science that has gone too far.

Morbius might also hold the title for worst credits stingers of all time. The first one is laughably lazy in its method of bridging franchises, like Venom 2, but less funny and more threatening. At least the nonchalant laziness of Venom 2’s scene felt appropriate for the character. And for the second stinger, I'm fairly certain they got an impressionist and CG double to fill in for a returning character's actor who, understandably, couldn't be bothered to come back for this.

There’s no reason to watch this movie, except for the apparent promise that we will see Dr. Michael Morbius again in the future, unfortunately, and perhaps even in the MCU Spider-Man films. But you’d gain so little understanding of the character by watching this that you might as well go in cold when he shows up in a trailer for the next Spider-Man. Or Sinister Six. Or whatever those dweebs at Sony plan on doing with all these heroless villains.

The only thing I want to see more of from this movie is a version of the scenes where there's no vampire face-filter whenever Leto and Smith flex their inner beasties. That’d be a blast. Next time, just tell the actors you’ll fix it in post, then don’t.