Hey what's going on guys, Dan here! Today I'll be giving a review on the movie, Morbuis starring Jared Leto
WARNING: This contains spoilers about the film, you have been warned.
Straight off the bat (pun intended), I think the concept for the film could have worked and sounded like a great idea on paper. Unfortunately, the execution of the film was just not on the mark here. I would consider this the Eternals of the Sony-verse movies and what do I mean by that? I mean this film is pretty generic and predictable. The Eternals was basically just running off the same MCU formula only the most bare bone elements. Morbius followed the same formula much like Venom only more bare bones.
The cast I felt was an A-team cast, you had Jared Leto, Matt Smith, Tyrese Gibson, Jared Harris, Adria Arjona and so much acting talent on this movie. Yet, the characters hardly show any emotion to the scenes. It's like they were robotic and the only ones who put effort into their roles were Jared Leto, Al Madrigal (who plays one of the detectives, Rodriguez) and maybe Matt Smith. I've seen each one of these guys act in different movies and they can all act but this movie here just seemed as lifeless and void of all emotion much like the actual undead. I feel especially bad for Jared Leto because he's a great actor but for some reason these comic book superhero movies are just his kryptonite man. His performance as the Joker from the 2016 Suicide Squad movie was already considered his worse performance, but this could possibly be a close second in the Morbius movie. It may not even be superhero movies that he has trouble with, if you've seen the Snyder Cut of the Justice League, you'll see that he's playing the Joker again but his performance there is 10x better than the Suicide Squad movie. So this makes me believe that if given to the right director and crew, he can put on a great and memorable performance. That is not the case here however, Daniel Espinosa really fucked up what could had been a potentially great movie and I don't know why he was trusted with this film. I saw his other works and it looks like to me that this was not the right man for the task, Sony should have brought in someone like Matt Reeves or Zack Snyder to handle this film rather than someone who seems like they've never touched a comic book.
Now let me get to the actual film, the film itself was admittedly pretty alright. I wouldn't consider it great or god awful, it's more like somewhere in the middle to just about average, like generically average. The plot of the movie was like someone mixing the plots of The Hulk and Dracula Untold into one and this was the result of this Frankenstein experiment. It was as generic and bare-bone to the point where I knew what they were gonna say and what was gonna happen before they even did or said it. Like at the beginning they ask Morbius in Costa Rica "you need a Doctor?" and his response is "I am a Doctor." or when he says "I need to drink....." and it was like Dora the explora I responded with "Blood." and he said "Blood.". There was also the scene were Dr Martine was suppose to die, but she ends up becoming a vampire herself in the end of the movie and I knew they wouldn't kill her off. The writing here was just as generic and dare I say as lazy as it could be. My last complaint about the Plot is that it feels so rushed, there's a scene where the doctor played by Jared Harris who takes care of Matt Smith's character Loxias (Milo is his nickname in the film) is killed by Loxias and when Morbius arrives, the doctor immediately dies but in most half baked way, like he just mutters his last lines.
The editing was another thing poorly done in this movie, this was The Hulk levels of poor editing in the scenes because it would have the characters talking to one another but with another scene of them doing something else like experiments and lab work. There were also the boat scene where Morbius experiments on himself and he becomes the Vampire creature he is and start slaughtering the crew while Dr. Martine is unconscious and I actually thought that scene was entertaining and savage to watch but I had this suspicious feeling that it was suppose to be more gruesome. There are scenes of Morbius slashing their throats with his claws and you can see that these guys are choking on their own blood, but they never show them bleeding or really coughing it up or the cut marks since the guy is covering it. This makes me think this movie was suppose to be more gory and brutal like it was suppose to be a rated R film but they decided against that last minute and changed it into a more PG-13 film which would explain those scenes being the way they are. If this was the case, then they should have kept it R rated, I would have liked to have seen a gorier version of this film. I think they had this issue with Venom as well but it was more well done than how it was done in Morbius.
On to the special effects and CGI used, I think the special effects were my favorite part of the film but even those are done questionably at times. Like the fight scenes are pretty cool at times but they do it like its the Matrix, most of it is in Slow-Mo or done fast af that if you blink you miss it. There was also the times where Morbius and Loxias would show their vampire faces and it would look like that scary snapchat filter from mid 2010's that Obama used in that parody video years back. Then there was the scenes with the swarm of bats Morbius used to fight Loxias in the final battle where the bats were controlled by him, that reminded me of Dracula Untold and it was pretty cool I always like that concept of Vampires to control bats to your whim. My favorite scenes are where he uses his bat sonar abilities and his eyes would go hazy and the echo location waves would pop up and remove all sounds around him. That's another ability of Vampires I always thought was pretty cool.
Overall, I think the movie was alright but it just wasn't as good as everyone was hoping. It seemed rushed and the sad part is they could have done a better job with it because this was originally slated for 2020 but the Pandemic pushed it back to 2022 and they could have used that time to improve the movie but they didn't go that route and they squandered this movies potential. I also want to confirm there are two post credit scenes so stick around for those if you're gonna watch it.
Rating this film, I would give it:
5/10
That may sound a bit high considering all I had to say but again, this film is not really awful, it's just generic and the concept was great but the execution fell short. I would not recommend buying the 10, 12 or 14 dollar ticket to see this movie I don't think it's worth that price of admission. If you have a rewards program like my date did to see this film for free or cheaper than I'd recommend that instead. If not, then wait for the film to come out of Redbox in a few months so you can rent it for 1.99.
That's all I have to say, see ya!