Morbius is the new Columbia/Tristar/Marvel production and this time Jared Leto plays Dr Michael Morbius a great scientist who was born with a blood based disease that sees him needing crutches to walk everywhere and nearing death at every turn but on a trip to Costa Rica he thinks that Bats and Bat Blood may hold the key to finding a cure for his disease but this trip to find a cure may make such a cure worse than the disease.
Morbius is sadly not a good film and after a quarter of 2022 having mostly pretty good films for the most part this is the first genuine dud I feel like I’ve seen so far this year and for once Leto is not to blame here he delivers a fine enough performance but the problems here are much bigger.
Firstly this film is badly lit from a photography point of view, Oliver Wood is the DP here and he seems along with Daniel Espinosa the director seem to have gone to the Zack Snyder school of lighting where the light switch is an alien invention and so many of the films scenes are shot in this borderline darkness or lit by distant neon lights of the city streets and it looks terrible and at some points I kept thinking to myself “TURN THE LIGHT ON!!!” as I got sick of seeing the near constant darkness and low lighting, its not moody its awful.
Secondly the action scenes are terrible, so much of them are this misty, smoky CG that is hard to follow with your eye and shot so quickly and edited from one moment to the next in similar speed that you cannot tell who is who and what is happening and where everything is going on and again its terrible to watch and also for a character that is said to be a Vampire there is very little blood here and this leads me to a greater point.
Marvel (and I will include Marvel Studios in this) needs to realise as Warner Brothers and DC have done that some of their characters cannot be properly put on film within the confines of an M rating some of their characters are inherently MA15+ rated characters be it Morbius or Blade or Deadpool or Wolverine or Black Widow to name as examples and they need to tailor their films to this realisation when it comes and this has firstly got me thinking all the more about what a missed opportunity Black Widow was for Marvel to test those waters without taking much of a risk with a new character in doing so but alas we got what we got and here we are.
Also I have found myself appreciating Tom Hardy’s work as Venom/Eddie Brock so much more now after seeing this movie and hey the Venom films aren’t the best of Comic Book films but Hardy’s work as Venom/Eddie is still enormously fun and very funny and this comes from Hardy committing himself 115% to those characters and their symbiotic dynamic and Let There Be Carnage released last year was fine as a film but Hardy was still very funny in his role and I still look forward to more of him in his role unlike Leto and Morbius who I would be happy to never see in another film again after this one.
But there is one bright spot here and that is Matt Smith from Dr Who, he goes for a fun Hammer Horror type of performance and it is the one bright spot in this movie because at the very least someone here is having fun and enjoying themselves plus Smith is building on his new Posh Slimeball persona that he started last year in Last Night in Soho even though some of his makeup work looked like Frank Langella’s Skeletor from Masters of the Universe also Jared Harris in this movie but he feels wasted in his small role.
And so that was Morbius and look its not awful but its so dull to watch and fans of these films deserve better but at least for once Leto isn’t the problem here though he doesn’t help matters either, 1.5 out of 5.
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