Review: Morbius (2022)

 Morbius (2022)

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, some frightening images, and brief strong language

Score: 1 out of 5

It’s amazing what desperation and scarcity can make you do. In a survival situation, it can make you kill a man for a loaf of bread, or eat bugs for the protein. In prison, it can make you join a gang for protection. And when you’re in a small town where the nearest theater is half an hour away and showing Morbius, and nobody else wants to drive out of their way to the multiplex in Moab, it can make you go see Morbius even though you know it’s gonna be bad, simply because you really wanna go out to the movies after a week of work. Now that I think about it, I now know why so many blockbusters have a floor for how much money they make on their opening weekend no matter how bad they are: this country is dotted with little one-screen theaters like the one in Blanding, Utah where people with nothing better to do go because they wanna zone out with their friends for two hours and don’t have any weed.

Believe me, Morbius is bad. It’s Sony’s latest desperate attempt to glom off of the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but while the Venom movies attained a level of “so bad it’s good” camp thanks to Tom Hardy’s fiendishly campy performance (or so I’m told; I haven’t seen them), Morbius has Jared Leto grimacing as a “brooding” vampire with zero presence in a story that I’m convinced went through several rewrites before finally hitting the big screen. It’s a movie where the action scenes were messes, characters’ motivations were barely explained, the post-credits scene felt like Sony begging Marvel “notice me, senpai!”, and the only person who seemed to know what kind of hot garbage he was in was the guy playing the villain. The only thing vampiric about it was the overall feel of the movie itself: a few lively moments that aren’t enough to convince you that you aren’t watching an undead mockery of a superhero film.

Dr. Michael Morbius is a brilliant doctor who has suffered all his life from a poorly-explained blood disease, one that he dedicated his life to developing treatments and eventually a cure for. Experimenting on vampire bats, he actually manages to not only pull it off, but develop a treatment that makes him superhuman. Unfortunately, it comes at a terrible cost, one paid by the security guards aboard the ship where he carried out his experiment on himself, far from prying eyes. He now needs to drink blood to survive, and while artificial blood will do for now, in a few days that won’t cut it anymore: he'll need the real deal, straight from the tap if possible. Yep, he’s a vampire. And to make matters even worse, Milo, a wealthy playboy friend of his with the same blood disease who Michael grew up with and treats almost like a brother, thinks that being a vampire would be awesome, and immediately gives in to his dark side upon getting his hands on Michael’s treatment.

The problems start with Dr. Morbius himself, Jared Leto, who is shockingly wooden in this part. I personally believe that Leto is a very hit-or-miss actor, but even when he gives a stinker of a performance, it’s normally at least interesting to watch thanks to his method acting and commitment. This, however, felt like he’d just clocked out and grabbed his off-brand Marvel paycheck, playing Michael with precisely one note throughout most of the movie. Events like him finding his co-worker/love interest Martine badly injured (and possibly worse) at his hands seemingly get only a noncommittal shrug out of him. Leto brings little weight, gravitas, or energy to the part, feeling like fundamentally the same guy before and after he becomes a vampire. It’s not entirely Leto’s fault, though, since the film itself doesn’t seem to actually care about him either, only interested in him as a character because he becomes a superhuman bloodsucker. To give an example, there’s an early scene where he’s receiving a Nobel Prize that then cuts to us being told he gave a sarcastic, mocking speech to the Nobel committee turning down the prize, but we never get to hear this speech or even learn about the contents of it beyond the broadest strokes. That sounds like something that could’ve lent him some characterization, movie! Instead, it felt like a half-hearted stab at the type of humor that has become almost a Marvel Cinematic Universe trademark, without understanding how Marvel consistently manages to make it work.

Nothing else in the movie was all that hot, either, not only doing little to compensate for the giant sucking sound of Leto’s performance but often winding up forgettable in its own unique ways. I barely remembered Adria Arjona as Martine, to the point that I had to look up her character’s name, such was how little she had to do beyond prevent this film from turning into a sausage fest. The action was uniquely unspectacular, shot by somebody straight out of the Olivier Megaton school of action scenes with a mix of dreadful shaky-cam and dreadful CGI that altogether made it nigh-impossible to tell what was happening on screen at times. The showcases of Michael and Milo’s vampiric powers were either punctuated by very jarring slow-motion at “cool” moments, seemingly designed to emulate the appearance of a comic book splash panel like we were back in the early ‘00s era of comic book movies (there are some things about Y2K nostalgia that are best left in the past), or utterly slathered with purple mist to show us that they’re in vampire mode. The rare few effective moments were the brief stabs at horror where the film had to slow down and let us take a nice, long look at something creepy in the background, but these were few and far between.

I almost felt bad for Matt Smith, the only person who seemed to realize what this movie really called for. Spurning Leto’s self-seriousness in favor of playing Milo like he was playing Lestat, Smith felt like the only person in the cast who was having any fun with his part or the material in general, and almost by default, he stole the show in nearly every scene he was in. His performance was almost enough to make up for how one-note and thinly-written Milo was as a character, finding layers to an otherwise empty villain that almost make you see why Michael shouldn’t trust this guy with knowledge of his treatment. Milo was still something of a nothing character, but Smith lent him the spark that kept him from being completely forgettable, and made me wish he was in a better movie.

The Bottom Line

Morbius is a mess, a disaster of a movie that should make everybody at Sony Pictures think twice about their plans to create their own cinematic universe out of the scraps of the Spider-Man rights they have on hand. I’d tell you to skip it, but going by the box-office returns, it sounds like there are a lot of little one-screen theaters in this country.