2022’s Morbius is the morbingest movie ever made. It is the first movie to sell over a trillion tickets and it made 100 morbillion dollars at the box office, which shall be renamed the Morb office in its honor. It has a 900% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which shall also be renamed Morbin’ Tomatoes. The best part is at the end, when Morbius says his famous catchphrase “It’s Morbin’ time!” and uses the power of Morb to defeat the villain. Morbius is the ultimate cinematic masterpiece, or morbsterpiece, and is the morbingest movie of all time.
Ahem.
You may have noticed that everything in that opening paragraph was completely unhinged. That is because Morbius is in fact quite bad, and the tidal wave of memes “praising” it after its release are ironic, because the movie is, you know…bad.
I’m a bit late to the Morbius party since this film came out a couple years ago. But with the recent release and subsequent failure of Madame Web, now felt like the perfect time to Morb. Morbius and Madame Web are Sony’s two most recent attempts to capitalize on the success of 2018’s Venom by giving spin-off movies to Spider-Man supporting characters, and wring every last cent they can get out of the wall-crawler and his supporting cast. Morbius and Madame Web both tanked spectacularly, because neither of them are very good, and because they are based on characters that are C-list at best. Venom is a character that has been popular for a long time and remains popular to this day, but the same cannot be said of Morbius and Madame Web.
Morbius was originally scheduled for release in July 2020, but was delayed six times until it eventually came out in April of 2022 to a decidedly unenthusiastic response. And by “unenthusiastic,” I mean “everyone hated it.” It also flopped at the box office, scraping together $73.9 million in North America and $93.6 million in the rest of the world. That’s…extremely underwhelming for a superhero movie. But the film’s failure did lead to one good thing: the memes, which are more entertaining than the actual movie. The memes were so funny and became such a hit online that Sony, apparently not understanding the concept of irony, re-released it into 1,000 theaters after it had mostly fizzled out. In its triumphant return, the movie made…$300,000, making Morbius one of the rare films to bomb theatrically not once but TWICE.
The biggest problem with Morbius is that is spectacularly, unfailingly, unflinchingly dull. It commits the greatest sin that a movie can commit.
It. Is. Boring.
The protagonist of Morbius is Dr. Michael Morbius, played by Jared Leto. Leto is a weird guy and I’ve never been a huge fan, and if you don’t like him very much then Morbius will do nothing to change your mind. The good doctor suffers from a rare blood disease that is slowly killing him. Determined to find a cure for his affliction, he secretly splices his genes with genes from Costa Rican vampire bats (I did that last Thursday just for shits and giggles, as one does) and what do you know, the cure works! Michael’s life is saved, BUT at a terrible cost. He is now a vampire with a thirst for blood.
Despite his superhuman speed, strength, and ability to use echolocation, he is now battling with his insatiable thirst for blood. For a while he is able to subsist on artificial blood he developed, but its effectiveness soon starts to wear off. Michael’s best friend Milo, who also suffers from the same blood disease, soon realizes that his friend has been miraculously cured, and resents Michael for not sharing the cure with him. Michael of course does not want Milo to become a vampire, but Milo steals the cure, becomes a vampire, and embarks on a killing spree.
Milo is played by Matt Smith, who is one of those actors who can be charming and sinister at the same time (see Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho for another example of this). Smith gives the best performance in the movie and I found him to be quite a bit more interesting than Morbius himself. But even then, his character is…kinda thin. Much like Djimon Hounsou in Rebel Moon, if I find Smith’s character interesting it’s because Smith is a good actor who is able to do something interesting with a poorly-written character. He also seems to be the only actor in the movie who is actually having any fun.
Milo is never given much of a reason to be evil. He just starts killing people and sucking their blood, and the only motivation the movie gives him is one line he says about how other people should suffer like he and Michael suffered. Um, okay? Like many superhero origin stories, the villain is someone with a close personal connection to the hero, but Morbius struggles to do anything interesting with their connection.
Look at Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie, for instance. The villain in that film is Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, who is the father of the protagonist’s best friend. There is a lot of compelling human drama to be mined from that scenario, and Morbius attempts something similar but falls completely flat. Norman Osborn is evil but not completely unsympathetic, and the scenes in which he grapples with his dual nature are some of that film’s best (aided considerably by a legendary performance from Willem Dafoe).
Milo seems like a nice enough guy at first but immediately becomes drunk with power (and BLOOD) and starts killing people willy-nilly. Even though I like Matt Smith, Milo goes from “pretty nice guy” to “unrepentant bloodthirsty psychopath” in record time, and despite Smith’s admirable efforts the movie never finds its groove and the central relationship and conflict between Michael and Milo ends up feeling somewhat hollow.
It also doesn’t help that the movie’s special effects are nothing special. The movie runs down the superhero origin story checklist but never does anything to distinguish itself from countless other films. X-Men came out in 2000, Spider-Man came out in 2002, and despite having two-plus decades worth of technological improvements and other movies to draw inspiration from, Morbius doesn’t do anything better than those movies did.
There’s not much action in this movie either, and the vampiric special effects are bland and uninteresting. Not only does this movie not do anything interesting with superhero tropes, it does nothing interesting with vampire tropes either. Despite the importance of blood to the characters and story, this is a mostly bloodless film and the vampire attacks lack any sort of visceral impact. If you want to watch a good superhero/vampire film, watch Blade, which came out all the way back in 1998 and is still a much more compelling and entertaining film than Morbius.
It also annoys me that there are two cops in Morbius who are entirely pointless characters. One of them is played by Tyrese Gibson, who I am not a fan of because he drags down every Fast and Furious movie and I find his schtick to be smug and obnoxious. To be fair, he is nowhere near as irritating in this film, but his character is basically there solely for exposition and if you took the two cops out of the movie entirely it would have had no effect whatsoever on the underwhelming outcome of the plot.
The movie’s status in the continuity of Marvel films is also confusing. It’s meant to take place in the same universe as the two Venom movies, and even directly references Venom at one point. But then at the end of the movie it has the audacity to bring in the Vulture from Spider-Man: Homecoming, played by Michael Keaton. Due to the multiverse-altering shenanigans of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Vulture gets transported to the mediocre Sony Spider-spinoff universe, or whatever the hell they’re calling it.
It’s fun to see Vulture again because I liked that character, but his inclusion at the end of Morbius feels like a half-assed attempt to connect the mediocrity of the Sony-verse to a much better and more successful series of films. Marvel movies have become known for their post-credits stingers, but the stinger at the end of Morbius, like so much of the rest of the film, feels tired and ultimately falls flat.
You want to know the telltale sign of a bad film? It feels like it goes on for much longer than it actually does. Morbius is mercifully short at only 104 minutes, but it feels like it goes on and on for at least two and a half hours. The Batman, for example, is three hours long but I find it so engrossing that those three hours go by in a flash. Morbius is the polar opposite. It’s dramatically inert and offers nothing worth caring about in terms of story or character. It’s a total snoozefest, but hey, at least the memes are funny. If nothing else, at least we can all agree that Morbius is indeed the Morbingest movie of all time.
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