And it’s appallingly bad. Worse, though, it’s not as bad as I’d been led to believe. In its short existence, Morbius has already become shorthand for the very worst that the comic book movie has to offer. Yet I find myself wishing Morbius were as bad as all that; a true cinematic catastrophe might have been a little bit fun to watch, yet Morbius is almost aggressively mediocre and unspeakably dull. It’s too boring to be as bad as I’d hoped.
After inventing artificial blood, Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) uncovers a secret to the moribund malady that plagues him, concocted through experimentation on vampire bats. His human trials on himself, however, prove less than inspiring, transforming him into a living vampire of sorts, to the consternation of his lady friend Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), while piquing the interest of his childhood friend Lucien (Matt Smith), who suffers from the same illness as Morbius.
I watched Morbius as a completist, yes, dragging myself unwillingly through every piece of media tangentially related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Morbius is set in the same universe as the middling Venom duology, which has its own tenuous ties to Spider-Man, and the film closes with an infuriating post-credits scene tying Michael Keaton’s Vulture into the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home through the magic of corporate synergy. To see the whole, then, I had to agonize through the sum of its parts. But I also bit the bullet (no pun intended) and watched Morbius so that I’d have a bad review to write. I wanted to tear this thing apart, vivisect its exquisite corpse for a page and a half, and inveigle against a universe that conjured up a monstrosity as macabre as Morbius.
And yet Morbius is the second Marvel movie in a year to make me want to fall asleep. Like Black Widow before it, Morbius is entirely basic, carrying no thrills or surprises as it proceeds from plot point to editorially-mandated plot point. It makes only as much sense as it needs, its characters are thin and stereotypical, and it is exactly the movie you expect to see based on the first frames of the film, let alone the trailer. Morbius lacks only Florence Pugh to lend it a semblance of watchability; without her delightful enthusiasm, Morbius ends up being an altogether joyless affair.
At times the king of overacting, Leto is virtually sleepwalking through this franchise non-starter. His dialogue is drowsy, and the only interesting thing about his performance is the occasional CGI transition from his human face to a vampiric one. It’s got nothing to do with Leto, though, and everything to do with the fact that I would rather have been reading a comic book (or, as I reflected during some of the snoozier bits, rewatching the “Neogenic Nightmare” episodes of the mid-90s Spider-Man: The Animated Series). When he’s fighting as Morbius, Leto is passably more watchable, yet I’m certain that’s more to do with dangling a computer-generated shiny object in front of the primitive centers of my brain.
The rest of the cast are crowning achievements in forgettability. Adria Arjona is a snore as Morbius’s colleague-turned-love interest, an about-face that’s so uninspired that the abrupt kiss between them made me realize that I was supposed to mistake this lazy writing for character development. The only memorable moment in Arjona’s performance comes when she mispronounces the name of the “Nobel Prize,” calling it the “Noble Prize” twice in a row. Matt Smith’s antagonist is thinly written, not quite saved but placed on life support by Smith’s hammy fervor for the part; why he’s gone evil, or whether he’s been bad all along, is something about which the script doesn’t quite seem to care. Meanwhile, Tyrese Gibson is cast as a policeman tracking Morbius, who has no character development beyond being gruff and surly, and his periodic appearances serve to give the illusion of tension, as though any of us quite cares whether he’ll arrest Morbius or not.
Then there’s Jared Harris, who’s in the film for reasons I can’t quite fathom. He’s a doctor who runs an orphanage, who then pivots his career into becoming an overpaid home health aide, and he’s only around to deliver a bit of pointed exposition when the movie remembers that he’s on the payroll. I’d spoil where his character ends up if I had any sense that readers or screenwriters alike had a fraction of a care for his good doctor. He’s perhaps included to lend a bit of class to this dour proceeding, but he’s given nary an opportunity to do it. He is good talent squandered; imagine if he’d been given the room to work this role into something approximating an Alfred-level confidant.
Morbius is dismal, but it’s not unwatchable in any kind of a dynamic way. It’s unwatchable in the way that a static feed actively resists being viewed, tedious and monotonous for far too long, even at 100 minutes. I’m all the more offended by the fact that the film threatens us with a sequel – and pressgangs poor Michael Keaton into trying to trick us to tag along. His appearance here makes no sense, his ties to the plot of No Way Home defy any sort of logic, and his invitation to “team up” is nakedly corporate. Worst of all, I’m fairly certain I’ll end up seeing Morbius II (More-bius?) purely because I don’t have the willpower to say “no.” These stories have me hook, line, and super-sinker, and so perhaps, lacking the ability to listen to my own instincts, I deserve Morbius.
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