Morbius

I haven’t seen an action movie before that essentially had no action - and when there was action, the VFX effect used to show a character is flying completely obscures your view of what’s happening. There is essentially no arc to this movie, only Jared Leto hell.

I’m already a #1 hater of Jared Leto and most of this movie was laughable because I can only imagine what the crew is thinking having to film him do these things as a “method actor.” The story of Morbius appears to be about Dr. Michael Morbius, a prodigy of medicine with a lifelong chronic illness that’s slowly killing him and his bestie, Doctor Who. He’s developed this supplementary blue blood that can take the place of blood donations, earning him a Nobel Peace Prize (which he refuses and then we continue to be incredibly bored).

Dr. Morbius believes that some sort of transfusion with vampire bat blood could cure his illness. So, obviously, we spend a lot of time in a lab watching him do boring science things for way too long along with his love interest Dr. Bancroft (Adria Arjona), with whom he has absolutely zero chemistry. The two of them end up successfully doing the transfusion on him and he transforms into his ugly bat self. I did laugh in the theater.

After he accidentally kills a ton of people, my guy secludes himself to his fancy office for an excessively long science montage of him figuring out what’s happened to him (honestly could exceed 15-20 minutes) with a painful Jared Leto voiceover.

There was one cool scene where a lab tech is killed in Stranger Things style as she flees down a hallway - the lights only on over spots where someone is directly beneath it - while she’s chased by another unknown vampire figure (spoiler alert: Doctor Who). That’s honestly just about it. There’s no reason for any character to do anything that they’re doing, the main character (minus the Jared Leto-ness) is incredibly unlikeable and irredeemable, things are said and then never addressed again. The last 10 minutes is a quick rush to throw everything together with a couple of extra early-credits scenes in order to set up a sequel (that no one wants). It’s such a shitty script.

The one time where I thought “oh my god there’s finally going to be an action battle or something” it’s exactly Not That. Doctor Who beats up a couple of police officers and Morbius is like “omg not the brother cops” and suddenly believes that Doctor Who is too far gone. At this point, the guy has been bad for maybe five minutes but whatever. There’s an uncomfortably long slo-mo shot of Doctor Who (in ugly bat form) running towards Morbius in the subway while Morbius stands there doing this gross echolocation thing with his ears after which he dives in front of the A train and glides along like a flying squirrel. End of action sequence.

Morbius has been surviving on his artificial blood bags and is going off on another tangential monologue about how “soon this won’t be enough” and refuses to drink real blood from bags because that’s “too far” - despite him having drunk maybe 14 people’s entire blood directly from their bodies in this film. Why is he suddenly having a conscience? How does he know any of the things he knows? There is no trial and error for this character; he does things with no rhyme or reason at all.

He makes this serum to kill the vampire bat connection inside of Doctor Who - which will also kill the human who is connected with it. He tells the girlfriend he has no chemistry with that he’s going to give himself the serum as well. So, he kills Doctor Who with the cure after a battle scene that is hardly legible on-screen (maybe they’ve obscured it because it’s badly made or there was no other effect money? I doubt they’re paid enough anyway to do this work, let alone stare at Jared Leto for an ungodly amount of hours) and then simply never mentions the other serum again? We just fully abandon the self-sacrificing plotline so we can go into those post-credit scenes that make things more confusing and depressing.

Who do these screenwriters know that would put them in the position to make a “blockbuster” out of a C movie script? It’s so stupid it’s laughable - Marvel is more in the business of stupid fun (and everyone loves that, me included), so I’m going to assume this movie will be buried far, far away. Sony should stick with Spiderverse instead. There’s no structure, no character depth, no sensible lore, and there’s Jared Leto. Four moves you should never make.

This wasn’t even fun bad like the original Suicide Squad or Batman vs. Superman, it’s just painfully dry and boring and poorly, poorly executed. If you’re looking to see Jared Leto make another cringeworthy ass out of himself, here you go.