Well I enjoyed this more than I thought I would but it's unquestionably the worst of the superhero genre.
The comic book character Morbius immediately seemed a strange choice to make a film about when this was first announced. But I suppose there is potential for something interesting, a proper mash-up of the horror and superhero genres. The problem here is that it all feels lazy and obvious, like no-one really had any interesting ideas of what to do with this character.
The premise is that Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) has a disabling blood illness but has an idea for a cure, by injecting vampire bat blood into the human blood stream. Morbius tries this on himself and it does indeed cure him whilst also giving him vampire-like superpowers and an incessant need to drink blood.
The origin just about works, even if scientifically it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But what then? Well there is the potential for the film to lean into the horror aspects but it only really does on two occasions, when Morbius first transforms and then when one nurse is stalked in a hospital- only the latter really has proper horror vibes. Apart from that the film the film blindly follows the generic superhero film format- origin, villain gets same powers, big CGI fight scene.
The Venom films, which occur in the same universe, have had many of the same problems but at least they have Tom Hardy's likeable lead performance. I wouldn't say that Jared Leto is especially bad in this film but I just found his performance uninteresting. The star of the show in every way is Matt Smith who seems to continually perform well in bad films and it's about time someone gave him a decent part.
Even the CGI looks dodgy in this film. It's worse when attempting to give the actors vampire-makeovers and I think they'd have actually been better off using prosthetics and make-up. It just doesn't look very good and adds to the sense that this is a draft version of the film.
I won't go into plot details but the mid-credits and post-credits scenes are especially awful. Marvel are very skilled at using these to tease characters and plot lines whereas Sony seem to lazily throw in an idea without bothering to think about the logic of it at all.
I kind of liked the skeleton of the film but more than anything it's frustrating that they didn't do something more interesting. They could have gone much further with the horror vibes and made the conflict in the film far more deep and interesting. Sony's attempt to build a universe with the characters they have the rights to has been an utter mess but I hope that they will begin to learn from their mistakes sooner or later.
Morbius takes a relatively obscure comic book character and gives him a solo film which follows the superhero template without doing anything of interest. Not every film from the MCU has been a triumph but at least it feels like they are trying.
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