Morbius (2022)
Director: Daniel Espinosa

There’s been a lot of negativity around Morbius, so I wanted to start this review by saying something positive for a change. Morbius really stimulated my intellectual curiosity, I left that theater and my mind buzzed with questions. Sure, they were questions like, “Why would Sony unleash Morbius on an unsuspecting world?”, “At what point did everyone on set give up?”, and, “Why didn’t anything happen in that movie?”, but those are questions nonetheless. I’m still trying to figure out why Sony took Morbius, a character that isn’t exactly iconic or particularly deep, and gave him a feature film as a debut. I could see introducing him as a side character in Venom 2 and then, if he becomes a fan favorite, getting a spin-off, but not an immediate solo film. That’s enough of that though because now I need to get into the nitty-gritty and explain why Morbius is the cinematic equivalent of waiting two years to cross a street, taking one step into a crosswalk, and getting immediately hit by a bus.

If you don’t know the story of Morbius, join the club, cause I saw it and can barely describe what I saw as having a plot, but I’ll try. Michael Morbius, regrettably played by Jared Leto, having dealt with some kind of degenerative disease his whole life, uses a bat-based experimental formula to fight his illness, like ya do. Naturally, this goes wrong and Morbius develops vampire powers, and no, it is never explained why he develops vampire powers from a serum designed to fix his blood coagulation, especially when vampire bats don’t have abilities like super strength and magical flying, but why should I give this more thought than the film? Morbius’ friend, played by an incredibly earnest Matt Smith, grows jealous of Morbius’ newfound abilities and steals the formula, because, being a superhero movie, the villain and hero must have the exact same powers so the climactic action sequence can be muddled and dull.

I realize as I’m typing this that I’ve left out huge chunks of the plot to fit more snark in, but at the same time that doesn’t matter at all. Morbius is ‘Going Through The Motions’ the movie. Admittedly, Leto and Smith seem to be trying, and maybe if the script or direction was better this could have worked, but the entire movie is scenes that happened because these are the scenes that should happen in a movie like this. Why have Morbius’ experimental formula need to be used in international waters? Oh, it’s because we needed a different location that isn’t a boring NYC street. Why have the sailors be violent thugs who carry assault rifles around on a scientific vessel taking a day trip? Oh, it’s because we needed people around Morbius can kill but we can’t feel too bad about it. Why have Tyrese Gibson be in the movie but do literally nothing the entire runtime? Oh, it’s so we could put a cool guy on the poster.

In a lot of ways, Morbius feels like it was made before superhero movies became big. When you look back on the late 90s/early 2000s stuff, there was clearly a lot of uncertainty with how to approach superhero films, from the costume changes to the scaling down of powers to try and figure out the best way to tell stories like these to the modern audience. But Morbius exists post-Avengers Endgame. We’ve figured out how to tell a decent story with characters who possess superhuman abilities. There is no reason on God’s Green Earth for a movie about a Vampire Antihero to be so bland and pointless and so lacking in grit and edge. If they had gone full grimdark then I can see an argument for why Morbius should exist, but when you have a character become a Vampire and then have that Vampire essentially cure his vampirism for the length of the film, then you’re left with a toothless (fangless?) Vampire who has no story. And yeah fine, at the end of the movie it is implied that he will eventually have Vampire urges…but why not have that be the plot of his origin story?

And while I’m talking about the writing, I would be remiss not to mention how brain-meltingly awful every single line of dialogue is here. There’s a faux-depth to everything, a sort of partial awareness of how serious Morbius takes itself when every single line is pure exposition about people’s motives and the ‘big ideas’ on display. Every scene has at least one groan-worthy line, either in its vapid pretentiousness or just in its nonsense. At one point Morbius holds a vial of anticoagulant poison and speaks loftily about how this is, “Deadly to bats…and fatal to humans”. A line so monumentally dumb and pointless that simply removing it and showing Morbius look meaningfully at a vial of colored liquid as it sloshes about could get across a similar meaning without embarrassing itself.

One last thing that may be unclear from this review. Morbius is absolutely hilarious. From scene 1 I was doing my best to stifle my laughter and not disturb the few other patrons in the theater, but Lord was that difficult. For example, in the opening scene Morbius spots a desiccated cow (or goat or something) corpse by the entrance to a cave full of vampire bats and announces that it is amazing that such small creatures could do this, not in any way realizing that vampire bats are not piranhas who swarm animals, but opportunistic parasitic predators who drink small amounts of blood from sleeping animals. And how did the cow get there? Did the bats swarm and lift it all at once?!? It’s so stupid and poorly thought out and I have only described half of that scene. There’s a ton of stuff like this in Morbius where I sat in awe of how thoroughly basic cinematic techniques could be misunderstood.

None of this is shocking. When the trailer debuted years ago, we all knew this was probably going to be a bad movie. I tried my hardest to approach Morbius on its own terms to see if I could have fun with Sony’s take on Marvel’s brooding vampire antihero, but there is simply no fun to be had that isn’t at Morbius’ expense. Morbius is bland, dull, stupid, dated, and just another misstep from Sony’s attempts to make a Spider-Man universe without Spider-Man. There is one person I blame least of all, and that person is director Daniel Espinosa. It seems pretty clear that this is a movie that the studio wouldn’t stop meddling with, so I don’t think it would be fair to judge Espinoza’s skill as a director based on Morbius, especially as this is his first feature. I’m looking forward to seeing what he’ll work on next…so long as it isn’t Morbius 2.