Released: April 2022
Director: Daniel Espinosa
Rated PG-13
Run Time: 104 Minutes
Distributor: Sony Pictures/Marvel
Genre: Action/Horror
Cast:
Jerod Leto: Michael Morbius
Matt Smith: Milo
Adria Arjona: Martine Bancroft
Jared Harris: Emil Nikols
April 1st. April Fool’s Day. This is a day for practical jokes and humor. I like pranks. It makes for some pretty lively conversation. Comedians do it all the time. What I DON’T like is when movie studios pull fast ones on the audience. I’ve done posts on marketing and how important it is to advertise your movie/product. But there has to be a degree of honesty when it comes to advertising. You don’t want to oversell it or reveal to much, otherwise you spoil whatever it is you’re advertising. Perfect example? Terminator Genisys. The second trailer to that movie revealed to the audience a major plot twist in the movie involving a main character. It ended up ruining the movie. On the flip-side, if you don’t reveal enough, you confuse the audience about the movie you want them to see, so they don’t know what it’s about. There’s a balance that needs to happen in trailers and marketing. It’s a tough game to play. But the one thing you DON’T do is lie to the audience. To be fair, in a lot of trailers, there are some scenes that don’t make it into the final film. Happens all the time. Editing happens for a reason, and some of those scenes might not make complete sense in the context of the film’s story, but they’re used to enhance the flavor of the trailer. But when your trailer advertises a specific character that people are familiar with and are expecting to see him in the main movie only for him to not be there at all? Guess what? That’s false advertising, and that’s illegal as hell. False advertising is not a prank you pull on people. Morbius did. But that’s not the only problem this movie’s got.
Jared Leto stars as Michael Morbius, a doctor/scientist who was born with a degenerative blood disease that is slowly killing. Desperate to find a cure, Morbius injects himself with bat DNA and becomes something entirely different. Infused with superhuman strength, flight, the ability to use echo-location(bat-radar), Morbius has never felt better. The problem? He has to drink blood every 6 hours or he will die, and since he refuses to drink human blood, he drinks synthesized blood that he created. On paper, the idea behind Morbius is pretty cool. Vampires are generally awesome…except for the sparkly kind, but I digress. There hasn’t been a Marvel-based vampire movie since the Blade trilogy, so I was curious to see how they were going to handle the character of Morbius. Unfortunately, the script was written by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless. For those who don’t know who these jokers are, they wrote the following: Dracula Untold, The Last Witch Hunter, Gods of Egypt, Power Rangers 2017(I did like this one quite a bit, though), and the new Lost in Space show. To be fair, I enjoyed Dracula Untold, but that wasn’t because of the writing. When I first heard that Morbius was going to be written by the guys that did Gods of Egypt, any hope of this movie being good went right out the window. The story really goes nowhere, and it doesn’t tie into the rest of the Sonyverse as the trailers had advertised, and the whole thing feels…empty. Also: IT’S ANOTHER FUCKING ORIGIN STORY! How many origin stories have we had over the past decade and a half? Did we really need another one? One of the things I appreciated about the new Spider-Man movies was that the character was already established. Nobody knows who Morbius is. Then again, nobody knew who Shang-Chi was, and HIS movie was awesome. There was NO excuse for the way this movie turned out. They had years to fix whatever problems there were, but they didn’t. In fact, they made it worse.
Let’s get the good stuff out of the way, because there’s not much. First of all, the casting is mostly decent. First off, Matt Smith as Milo was smart. Matt Smith is always awesome. He’s a lot of fun to watch, and seeing him be the bad guy was amusing. Adria Arjona as Bancroft was also a pretty good decision. Her relationship with Morbius was one of the better aspects of the film. It actually felt genuine, as did the initial relationship between Morbius and Milo. I think Jared Leto was inspired casting for the character. Leto has always been a bit strange, but he’s committed. This is surprisingly the most restrained that Leto has been in a movie, and it works fairly well. The design of Morbius is awesome. The look of the character is great. He looks terrifying, and the way he moves is fantastic. Some of the visual effects are pretty interesting. Not great, but not terrible. That’s where the good stuff ends. Tyrese Gibson, who plays one of the FBI agents, looks like he doesn’t want to be there, and totally acts like it. He served no purpose whatsoever. The great Jared Harris is completely wasted as Nikols.
Morbius is a movie that has no idea what it wants to be. Is it a horror movie? No, it’s far too predictable for that, and it’s violence is incredibly tame for a vampire movie. Is it an action movie? No, because the action is nothing but a muddle CGI-ridden mess where you can’t tell who is who and what is going on. It’s an incredibly confusing mess that needed more time in the editing room. Speaking of editing, where was Michael Keaton, who was featured so prominently in the marketing? He was relegated to a piss-poor post-credits scene. I only know about the post-credit scenes from the Internet, because I didn’t stick around when the credits started rolling. This movie is a mess. There are scenes that just don’t make sense in terms of where they’re supposed to be, and some are not long enough. You can also tell because the ADR is poorly done. The music? Shameless. There is a scene in which Morbius is surrounded by bats and for a moment, you think you’re hearing music from Batman Begins. It’s on obvious rip-off of a better score.
Considering how often Morbius was delayed, there really should be no excuse for how it turned out. With some minor exceptions, this is easily one of the worst comic book movies I’ve ever seen. In fact, I would put it up there with Elektra as one of the worst Marvel movies ever. Honestly, I hope that there’s some kind of extended director’s cut out there somewhere that can fix some of these problems. Granted, a lot of them are script-level, so I blame the writers for that, but this is an embarrassing mess. Sony’s had two decent Venom movies(I’m liking the second movie more as I watch it again over time), plus they had an outstanding partnership with Disney and Marvel Studios for the recent Spider-Man movies. It’s clear that Sony needs somebody like Kevin Feige to set things straight, because right now, it’s not looking good for what Sony has planned for their Marvel movies. I’m hoping this is a fluke, and that upcoming movies for characters like Kraven the Hunter are better. Honestly, I haven’t been this angry with a movie in years. It’s not as bad as Pixels, which I actually walked out of, but I was struggling not to walk out on this one. Stay away from this movie, unless there is an extended cut of some kind. It’s April 1st, and Morbius was a big, fat, fucking joke.