A family trip to see Morbius on the big screen was not exactly buoyed, given a lot of the critic reviews that had appeared. Unfortunately, the poor reception the film seems to have got is fully justified.
Morbius (Jared Leto) is a longstanding member of the Marvel universe and through the years has both become a mainstay of the Spiderverse and drawn Blade into that universe – a shoutout here for the Neogenic Nightmare series, which was a great cartoon. Film-wise this is a Sony production rather than a Marvel one but I did hope that, given Marvel rebooting Blade, we’d have something worthy of crossover into the MCU.
This sees Michael Morbius as a genius physician with a rare blood disorder. He's a bit of a maverick (we see him refuse the Nobel prize early on in the film, but waiting until he was at the award ceremony – or sort of, we see him introduced at the ceremony and then cut to him back in New York having refused it) and desperate to find a cure, not just for himself but his equally afflicted friend Milo (Matt Smith, the Doctor Who episodes Vampires of Venice & the Rings of Akhaten) – whose name isn’t actually Milo, a reference to a childhood affectation that was shown in flashback, which in itself felt like a failed attempt to build meaningful characterisation.
So, he does some gene splicing from the vampire bat to try and get the gene that allows production of an anticoagulant (as an aside vampire bats in a glass enclosure are never, ever still apparently) but it goes wrong and whilst the procedure cures him, indeed enhances him physically, it is temporary and produces a hunger for the blood that is necessary to keep the illness at bay. This hunger is immediately evident on the ship where he take the cure and then devours the 'cookie cutter' mercenaries he hired. That crime took place in International Waters and so one wonders whether it is really in FBI jurisdiction, but the FBI agents are languidly drawn anyway. Milo steals and takes the ‘cure’, becoming a vampire as well but where Morbius is using artificial blood (the efficiency of which is failing), Milo becomes a baddy who wants to manipulate Morbius out of his goodie-shell and over to the dark side with him. For himself, Morbius wants to stop Milo (and kill him for good measure).
That’s it in a nutshell and I can’t say it was a terrible film, which could have led us into “so bad it’s good” territory. Rather it was distinctly “meh”, an exercise in blandness that really was a worse fate for the film. The characters are hollow, the audience developing no sympathy for them. Morbius, of course, is better drawn than the others but even he is poorly constructed and Leto, whilst solid enough in acting chops, delivers a soulless performance. Then there is the action. Bar a couple of bullet time moments it is mainly an indistinct montage of blurring and shaking camera that adds no thrill to the outing. This failure as an action film is a shame considering that there was zero attempt to make this a horror film. A scene with a nurse stalked down a hallway was built for horror and yet was thoroughly pedestrian and the film shied so far away from blood and gore that it failed on that level also.
That’s it… meh… pedestrian, boring, never aspiring to horror, eschewing competent action or drama, failing to make its mark by plumbing the depths of Razzie level badness. Simply a faded vanilla (though my better half did enjoy shirtless Jared Leto). The imdb page is here.
Morbius (Jared Leto) is a longstanding member of the Marvel universe and through the years has both become a mainstay of the Spiderverse and drawn Blade into that universe – a shoutout here for the Neogenic Nightmare series, which was a great cartoon. Film-wise this is a Sony production rather than a Marvel one but I did hope that, given Marvel rebooting Blade, we’d have something worthy of crossover into the MCU.
This sees Michael Morbius as a genius physician with a rare blood disorder. He's a bit of a maverick (we see him refuse the Nobel prize early on in the film, but waiting until he was at the award ceremony – or sort of, we see him introduced at the ceremony and then cut to him back in New York having refused it) and desperate to find a cure, not just for himself but his equally afflicted friend Milo (Matt Smith, the Doctor Who episodes Vampires of Venice & the Rings of Akhaten) – whose name isn’t actually Milo, a reference to a childhood affectation that was shown in flashback, which in itself felt like a failed attempt to build meaningful characterisation.
So, he does some gene splicing from the vampire bat to try and get the gene that allows production of an anticoagulant (as an aside vampire bats in a glass enclosure are never, ever still apparently) but it goes wrong and whilst the procedure cures him, indeed enhances him physically, it is temporary and produces a hunger for the blood that is necessary to keep the illness at bay. This hunger is immediately evident on the ship where he take the cure and then devours the 'cookie cutter' mercenaries he hired. That crime took place in International Waters and so one wonders whether it is really in FBI jurisdiction, but the FBI agents are languidly drawn anyway. Milo steals and takes the ‘cure’, becoming a vampire as well but where Morbius is using artificial blood (the efficiency of which is failing), Milo becomes a baddy who wants to manipulate Morbius out of his goodie-shell and over to the dark side with him. For himself, Morbius wants to stop Milo (and kill him for good measure).
That’s it in a nutshell and I can’t say it was a terrible film, which could have led us into “so bad it’s good” territory. Rather it was distinctly “meh”, an exercise in blandness that really was a worse fate for the film. The characters are hollow, the audience developing no sympathy for them. Morbius, of course, is better drawn than the others but even he is poorly constructed and Leto, whilst solid enough in acting chops, delivers a soulless performance. Then there is the action. Bar a couple of bullet time moments it is mainly an indistinct montage of blurring and shaking camera that adds no thrill to the outing. This failure as an action film is a shame considering that there was zero attempt to make this a horror film. A scene with a nurse stalked down a hallway was built for horror and yet was thoroughly pedestrian and the film shied so far away from blood and gore that it failed on that level also.
That’s it… meh… pedestrian, boring, never aspiring to horror, eschewing competent action or drama, failing to make its mark by plumbing the depths of Razzie level badness. Simply a faded vanilla (though my better half did enjoy shirtless Jared Leto). The imdb page is here.
2 comments:
Can't say I'm surprised tbh. It's looked rubbish since it's first teaser. I hear the two post credits scenes are awful and nonsensical also. Makes you wonder what Sony are playing at. I'll sit this one out, as I have the last 2 Venom movies. Thanks for confirming what I expected.
Hi Tom, good to hear from you :)
It befuddles me that they can make such a misjudgement, whoever greenlit the release made a vast mistake - although maybe there wasn't anything in the filmed footage worth a reedit.
To be fair we didn't stay for the post credit scenes - the Michael Keaton one had already been spoiled in official pre-release material but that wasn't the reason, there was just no compunction to do so given what we'd watched
Post a Comment