Movie Review : Morbius (2022)

Apr 11

Apr 11 Movie Review : Morbius (2022)

To say Jared Leto’s life has been difficult over the last couple years would be a gross overstatement, but he’s known more peaceful and purposeful days. It’s unclear whether or not Thirty Seconds to Mars will make any more music and his ridiculous method acting has made the headlines far more than his actual performances since his less than ideal interpretation of Joker in Suicide Squad, in 2016. After flopping so hard at superheroes once, it’s unclear why he’d thought another superhero would save his career.

But here we are. Morbius is terrible and will only move Jared Leto’s career in the wrong direction, but it’s not really his fault.

In case you were familiar (I sure wasn’t), Michael Morbius is a Marvel character who debuted as a villain for Spider-Man in 1991 before getting his own comic book run. Long story short, he’s the world’s most self-involved doctor, who dedicated his life to medicine only to cure his childhood friend (Matt Smith) and himself from a rare blood disease. He manages to do it, but turns his friend and himself into vampires in the process and one thinks blood sucking is a lot cooler than the other does. Shenanigans ensue.

**Is Morbius really as bad as the critics claim?**

Not really, but it’s still pretty bad. The project was announced over two years ago and delayed several times fore pandemic reasons, but it felt doomed already then. Avengers : Endgame had closed the first MCU cycle a couple months prior and Marvel fatigue was a thing. The announce felt like a cynical cash grab from Sony, a studio already reputable for cynical cash grabs and the involvement of the melodramatic Leto already had critics bagging about the silliness of the premise. So, Morbius has insane odds to overcome.

But it’s not Jared Leto’s fault if the movie sucks. No one on the cast is abysmal, but no one’s great either. They’re just doing what they can to keep such a poor screenplay afloat. It is based on an incomprehensible Macguffin that has Michael Morbius perform his life-saving DNA surgery thing on a boat full of bad guys in international waters because apparently it is "highly illegal" to shoot yourself with vampire bat DNA. The only purpose of that overblown setup is to put two useless cops in his way.

This will lead to Morbius’ eventual arrest and to his buddy Milo freeing him from prison and explaining to him that because they were vampires, they were both above the law now. Morbius is structured around this bogus investigation in order to give moral stake to the story, but it’s not like Morbius and Milo have chosen a side. Each one just thinks the other is fucking stupid and out out of control, so they fight. Never before a movie went through such pointless lengths to make vampires punch one another.

That was a weird and silly sentence to type, but Morbius is that kind of weird and silly.

The whole vampire-on-a-boat Macguffin isn’t the only reason who Morbius sucks, but it’s the major one. The entire scenario is riddled with bad writing. In the introductory scene, a bedridden child Milo is dropping a letter from Morbius, which flies through the window and apparently into the hands of the most vicious bullies in the world who beat up a sick kid for a sheet of paper. I get the point was to make him sympathetic and powerless, but kids don’t beat obviously sick kids THEY’VE NEVER SEEN for no reason.

The non-cinematic elephant in the room

The most depressing thing about Morbius is that is exists purely for business reasons. It was made as a preamble for Sony’s own branch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In case it wasn’t clear enough, the bad guy from Spider-Man : Homecoming shows up mid-credits for reasons thoroughly unexplained in the movie. Apparently it has something to do with something that happens in Spider-Man : No Way Home, but I haven’t seen this one, so I had to read an explanation off Wikipedia like a peasant.

You’d think Morbius would’ve been strategically good like the first Iron Man was, but it isn’t and it reeks of studio involvement. Word is that many directors turned away the job before Sony settling on derivative movie black belt Daniel Espinosa and the screenwriting team of Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless who penned iconic films like Dracula Untold and Gods of Egypt in the past. I understand that the character was a hard sell from the get-go, but if you have plans for him… give him a fighting chance?

Although it has a considerably lower score than most Marvel movies on RottenTomatoes, Morbius delivers more or less the same thrills than any other films in the MCU: it has the brooding hero, the feminist love interest that turns into a damsel in distress, the somewhat relatable villain, stylish action scenes, moral storytelling, etc. It’s not a failure of cinema by any means. It just feels spectacularly cheap and unloved, especially three weeks after seeing The Batman. Sony Entertainment, you suck.