Morbius: The Worst Movie I’ve Ever Seen

For today’s header, I designed something almost as low-effort as our topic movie – simply a Morbius promotional image with my initial reaction to such masterful art overlayed on top. Morbius is hands down the worst movie I have ever seen. Please do not go see it; every dollar spent on this movie at the box office is that much more incentive for Sony to make another. This is the first movie where I found myself repeatedly checking my watch in the theater to see how much more I had to sit through. If you care to stick around and read on, I’ll be diving into what made this movie the unwatchable garbage it is.

Jack’s Score – 0/100 | Rotten Tomatoes – 16% | Audience – 70% | IMDb – 5.2/10

To preface, I am a person who generally enjoys most movies I watch. My average score for a movie out of 100 is currently about a 76. While I haven’t been watching movies I know are bad simply for the sake of ranking them, I still feel that this number is an accurate reflection of my outlook towards movies. As a result, you won’t often see an extremely negative review from me. To book a movie at a 0/100, it has to reach a new depth of bad, as even Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Fant4stic got 1s out of me.

Let’s start with the marketing. I have no idea what Sony Pictures is doing but whatever it is isn’t working. This movie is delayed two years or so, which is already a bad start. Then, Sony cuts together a trailer capitalizing on the Spider-Man hype, making fans question what universe Morbius takes place in.

Additionally, I don’t think a single shot from the trailer made it into the final cut of the movie, which left me confused. The trailers they’ve been running on TV have had distracting and unaesthetic text at the top of the screen. The text doesn’t provide anything beneficial as it’s just the title and the release date or “Now in Theaters”, both pieces of information which appear at the end of the trailer.

Reports have also said Sony instructed the director, Daniel Espinosa, to just give away a few scenes in an interview days before the movie’s release. These scenes were the post-credit scenes tying in the MCU’s Vulture, played by Michael Keaton. If you ask me, this was an absolutely bonkers move by the studio as this tie-in was a huge incentive for audiences, specifically fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to go see the movie.

Now we get to the real meat and potatoes – what was wrong with the movie itself? The writing, for one, was horrendous. There is a line leading up to the climactic fight where Morbius (Jared Leto) is synthesizing an anti-coagulant to take out Milo (Matt Smith), his life-long friend turned crazed sociopath. Morbius then drops an absolute heater of a line with, “To bats, it’s lethal. To humans, it’s deadly.” I mean what a masterclass in dialogue folks. The rest of this movie is filled with this same meaningless, awkward, and often redundant writing.

The character relationships made no sense. Michael Morbius’ relationship with Martine (Adria Arjona) was forced and unnecessary. They had little chemistry together but were written into a relationship despite this fact. The movie also took lengths to show Milo’s jealousy of this relationship. Later Milo is jealous of his doctor and father figure’s favoritism toward Michael, favoritism we never see on screen. However, this is still enough for Milo to kill Dr. Nicholas (Jared Harris) in a jealous rage.

Milo also decided to become the apex predator and drink human blood after taking the cure. He makes no effort to live off the artificial blood and justifies this decision by citing how now the rest of the world can take a turn being afraid. However, at no point in the movie is he shown or implied to have a grudge against the rest of humanity. Overall this villain’s motivations are all over the place, completely failing to draw me in or have me empathize with the character. Additionally, Matt Smith was allowed to chew on a couple of scenes way too long.

What was Tyrese doing? No, really, I’m serious. To be honest, I don’t think Sony even gave him a script. They might have just brought him on set for a few scenes and told him to ad-lib an FBI agent. I actually enjoyed his character in this movie (mostly because I like Tyrese), but he had no arc, no driving motivation, and didn’t help resolve the plot in the end. The same purpose could have been fulfilled by not naming a specific agent, but just making the FBI, as an entity, hot on Morbius’ tail.

The CGI was terrible. The character design of the vampires was more akin to zombies, with the gaunt, discolored skin and the missing nose. The other visual effects – Morbius’ echolocation and his flight – were also unappealing and lackluster. They both used a blur effect, causing Morbius’ immediate surroundings to give off these out-of-place auras that felt uncharacteristic of the movie.

The plot was a scattered mess. There is nothing that truly drives this movie forward. Nothing is ever fully fleshed out or explained, and characters act very erratically and seemingly do things for no reason. It’s never explained why Morbius is drawn to drinking human blood specifically. He never tries any other animal’s blood, making this scientist’s scientific method seems pretty flawed.

Additionally, this movie isn’t sure if it wants Morbius to be a villain or not. Early in the movie, he’s conflicted about his responsibility as a doctor and feels that he should be in prison so as not to harm anyone. Then by the end of it, he’s back on the lamb and doesn’t seem to have any regard for the public safety. In the climactic sequence, Martine gets her blood drained by Michael after she is killed by Milo so Michael can go full power mode. Then, she comes back to life in the end and turns into a vampire because a drop of his blood fell into her mouth as they were making out before she died. At no point was it made clear that Morbius’ condition was contagious, so this feels very random and out of place.

Most egregiously, the movie never comes to any sort of resolution. Morbius kills Milo with the anti-coagulant (which I should remind you is lethal to bats and deadly to humans) but in a fight that lasted all of thirty seconds and lost my attention before it even started. I think it was also supposed to be hard for Michael to kill Milo because of their bond, but that was conveyed very poorly and I felt no emotion during that entire sequence. Then Morbius flies off into the night as Tyrese watches in awe. Satisfied? No? Well, too bad because that’s where the movie ends.

Sony’s desperation to cling to the coattails of the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues with the post-credit scenes. As mentioned previously in this article, these scenes focus on Michael Keaton’s Vulture, who was the villain in Spider-Man: Homecoming. The first scene capitalizes on story elements from Spider-Man: No Way Home. We see a purple crack in the sky, no doubt caused by Doctor Strange’s spell, and Michael Keaton appears in a jail cell. In the context of No Way Home, there should be no scenario that put’s Keaton’s character in this universe. This is Sony once again tying itself to Marvel in a desperate attempt to garner a larger audience. They tried to insert Tom Hardy’s Venom into the MCU, which was immediately undone in a No Way Home post-credit scene.

Keaton wasn’t even on set for the second post-credit scene, evident by the fact that Vulture never takes off his mask. In this one, he’s set up a meeting with Morbius to discuss “putting together a sort of team” and how this has “something to do with Spider-Man”, clear allusions to the Sinister Six – a team of villains aligned to take down Spider-Man. While it’s clear Sony is trying to set up its next cash-grab, I wouldn’t be surprised if Marvel chooses to ignore this move from Sony completely. For context:

#Morbius director Daniel Espinosa says Kevin Feige was not involved with the post-credit scenes "Sony initiated that idea" (via @UPROXX) pic.twitter.com/qVi3Kd0v7m — Culture Crave 🍿 (@CultureCrave) April 4, 2022

Morbius is hands-down the worst movie I have ever seen. I cannot emphasize that enough. Stay away from it, but feel free to point and laugh from a distance. Maybe Sony Pictures can figure its superhero stories out, but as of right now I’m more on board with Zack Snyder’s DC garbage than I am with this “Sony-verse”. I hate to say that, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Get it together Sony.

I’ll try and get some more fun stuff out soon. Stay up-to-date on all things Jack Talks Movies by hitting the follow button in the bottom right corner.