Morbius

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D

               I don’t normally read other reviews before writing my own, but I couldn’t help but notice the incredibly negative buzz on Morbius. To that buzz, I say the following: welcome to the party, everyone! I’ve been saying for the last couple years that most Marvel movies have become generic and repetitive and I’m usually shouted at by people that somehow keep finding brilliance in all of these films. It seems like Morbius is the film that has finally broken people and, honestly. I’m not sure why. Sure, Morbius is a bad movie. It’s a bland, generic, paint-by-numbers comic book movie that makes no effort whatsoever to be unique or interesting in any way, but it’s still better than the Venom movies. So, that’s something right? It’s like getting shot and thinking “well, it’s better than that time I got stabbed!”

               Michael Morbius is born with a blood illness that causes him to be handicapped (I never quite gathered exactly what his condition is, but he’s sickly and that’s basically all that matters). As a young boy in a hospital in Greece, he meets another boy (whom he refers to as Milo) and they become the best of friends. Also, if you’ve ever seen a superhero movie before, you will immediately know that Milo will become the villain. Flash forward and Michael has become Dr. Morbius and won a Nobel Prize for his creation of synthetic blood. Morbius also seeks a cure for his condition by combining his DNA with that of vampire bats, a process that turns him into a vampire. Then the plot of almost every superhero movie ever made happens.

               Similar to Venom, there is a fundamental flaw here that dooms the film from the start and that is a basic misunderstanding of the main character. The character of Morbius started as a Spiderman villain and also fought Blade over the years before becoming something of a tortured, grey-area antihero character. Why can’t Marvel make a movie about a villain and allow them to be a frigging villain? Although I have some issues with it, these people really need to watch Jokerso that they can understand that the main character doesn’t need to be a hero. You can have a villain as the main character; you can do a character study or a cautionary tale. You can even present Morbius as an antihero, as he became in later comics. What you can’t do is what this film does: give the fewest fucks possible, take a generic superhero script and scribble in Morbius’ name. It’s fucking lazy and Marvel’s reluctance to take even the slightest risks, even with lesser-known characters, is becoming downright soul crushing. Every time one of these movies opens at #1 at the box office, the soul of some aspiring filmmaker somewhere dies and is cast into a creative hell where Disney executives give them notes on expanding their audience.

               Given that we can’t have anything interesting, instead we get one of the most bland comic book movies imaginable. The hero gets his powers, awkwardly learns how to use those powers, then has to fight the evil version of himself. Yes, this is one of those superhero movies where the villain is just the evil version of the hero, which we’ve seen before, to varying degrees of success, in Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Ant Man, Black Panther, Venom, etc. As I alluded to earlier, it’s also one of those superhero movies where we know who the villain will be the moment that he is introduced because this character arc is chiseled in stone as one of the ten commandments for shitty writers. This is a film where every scene and every plot twist is about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning. Every single moment in this film is stock, zero-effort horseshit that encapsulates why I have so little enthusiasm when I go to the theater anymore.

               In terms of performances, it’s sad that I have to give Jared Leto credit for merely being uninteresting here. Unlike Suicide Squad or House of Gucci, Leto doesn’t make any bewildering choices here that derail any scene that he is in (though it wouldn’t have mattered much anyway in the case of Suicide Squad). Instead, Leto gives the kind of bored, unengaged performance matches the effort that went into writing and directing the film. So kudos to Leto for merely being forgettable rather than godawful. That’s quite a show of growth as an actor. On the other hand, Matt Smith makes some attempt to steal scenes with an oddly flamboyant take on the stock villain character, but ultimately has little to work with. I do give him credit, though, for being the one person that seems to be making some sort of effort.

               On some miscellaneous points, the entirely CGI effects are fucking wretched and all of the fight scenes look like shitty cut scenes from a video game. On the plus side, this movie doesn’t have the stock Marvel comic-relief character, so I can’t do my normal schtick of cutting and pasting the section where I talk about that. On the what-the-fuck-is-happening side, the movie doesn’t quite seem to know what powers Morbius should have, so he simply has all of the powers depending on what the moment calls for. He has super strength and super speed, he can fly, he has super agility and can climb on walls like Spiderman, he has sonar vision….basically, he would be Superman if he could shoot lasers out of his eyes. The Marvel universe apparently doesn’t need Superman because it has vampires. Because that’s apparently how vampires work. I guess. I don’t know, this movie doesn’t have any rules and I don’t care if the filmmakers don’t care.

               This is kind of a throwback to comic book movies from the late 90s and early 2000s, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It feels like something that could have come out around the same time as Catwoman and Daredevil and fit in perfectly fine. Nothing here is memorable, nor does anything seem designed with the intention of making it memorable. It just feels like nobody cares. I made the mistake of waiting a week before I reviewed this and, in the interim, I basically forgot about all of the supporting characters. Wikipedia just told me that there is a female lead in this, but fuck me if I can remember her. I doubt it would make a difference since this film couldn’t even rent space in my brain for a full week. There was a time when I would have given this movie an F, but we now live in a post-Venom: Let There be Carnage world and my standards have been adjusted accordingly. So be warned: I’m only bored and disinterested in this movie, but a younger me would have passionately hated it before modern Hollywood completely crushed my spirit. So it has that going for it, which is nice.

Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morbius_(film)#/media/File:Morbius_(film)_poster.jpg