Someone please just tell Sony to sell the Spider-Man characters back to Marvel. Morbius is another fantastic addition into the catalogue of Sony Spider-Man films that completely butcher the basics of storytelling to make for a painfully boring and non-sensical plot. If you go in knowing this, you’ll probably have an ok time, but not a single laugh will be with the film it will always be laughing at the dumb decisions being made on screen.
To give a small list of the things that were passably ok in this film: Matt Smith wasn’t horrific, he leaned into the wacky, stupid nature of the plot and made his villain so over-the-top dumb that it was fun to watch. The CGI at times isn’t that bad, the effects on the slow-mo action are cool enough, and the facial design of Morbius is fine.
That’s it. That’s all there is to enjoy about this garbage movie that rivals Venom: Let There Be Carnage for the worst film from the Sony Spider-Man universe. It actually quite hard to know where to start with what was bad about this film because there’s that much, but let’s start with the plot. If you’ve seen a trailer, you’ve seen the film. Nothing surprising happens, at what’s even more concerning is that major plot points get left completely unregarded by the end. The film doesn’t even have the filmmaking competency to tie up all of the story, which is kind of the bare minimum you’d expect from a film.
This feels like a product of its time, if the time was the early 2000s where the world hadn’t had incredible examples of stories that could be told in the guise of a superhero film. The romantic interest for Morbius appears out of nowhere and is given absolutely no development throughout the story, expect to fuel Morbius by dying at the end of the film. Gotta love a classic example of fridging. None of Morbius’ powers are ever explained, or if they are they’re just completely illogical. The film fails to understand what echolocation even is. And Morbius can just tap into the wind when he wants to fly? The funniest moment has to be when Matt Smith’s character changes his name to Milo because Morbius told him to as a child and still goes by that name.
The main man himself Jared Leto has yet again outdone himself with another awful adaptation of a comic book character. When he is opposite Matt Smith, it’s hard not to want Smith to be playing the titular character as he’s so charismatic compared to the bland character we got. Honestly after a while it just becomes laughably bad that you might just end up having a good time.
Some of the action was cool but the film is so poorly shot that you can’t ever tell what’s going on, especially in the 3rd act, which is literally just colours on a screen. That’s until Morbius hadoukens a bunch of bats into Matt Smith. Also, someone please tell Hans Zimmer that they literally ripped off some of the score from The Dark Knight and used it here. It was so similar that it was jarring and didn’t work with the film at all. And those post credit scenes…
Shoutout to my screening though cause I had a blast. In the UK we don’t really clap or cheer for films, I saw Endgame at midnight and the audience was all crying, and in NWH and Titane people gasped but there’s never really the reactions you see videos of. However, at the end of this film the audience erupted into clapping, easily one of my favourite cinema experiences
★
