Today, I risk my reputation by writing a mildly
positive review of a flawed but entertaining movie. Did I like it? Morbiyes I
did.
Morbius stars Jared Leto as Dr.
Michael Morbius, Matt Smith as Milo, Adria Arjona as Martine Bancroft, Jared
Harris as Dr. Emil Nicholas, and Tyrese Gibson as Simon Stroud.
Before I go into the pluses and minuses, what I
enjoyed, and the misfires I noticed, I want to address the elephant in the
room. The second end credits scene is as dumb and nonsensical as everyone says
it is. It raises unneeded questions and is a complete character shift for
Morbius. Even though the first one is silly, it at least kind of makes sense,
and if that would’ve been the only end credits scene then I think there would
be one less problem with Morbius.
Morbius is nowhere close to the best
comic book movie of all time. None of Sony’s recent Marvel films have been. One
thing Morbius isn’t is an unwatchable shit show. Is the script imperfect?
Yes. Is every performance great? No. Were the references to other Marvel
characters a little corny? Absolutely. Did I enjoy watching the movie? Yes I
did, quite a bit at times.
The core performances of Morbius and Milo were the
highlights of the film. Jared Leto’s performance as Morbius was better than his
performance as The Joker in Suicide Squad.
It was still cool to see him do vampire stuff and learn how to hone his powers.
The theme of all of Sony’s Marvel films is that each hero has a dark side and Morbius fits that theme about as well as
you’d want.
Matt Smith stole just about every scene he was in. His
character was basically Morbius if he turned off his morals and boosted his
ego. The personal connection between Morbius and Milo did help with the story. Does
it follow the trope of a hero’s first villain basically being an evil version
of himself to a T? Yeah, you bet, but it didn’t detract from the film in my
opinion.
The secondary characters in this film, are relatively
unremarkable but are not unimportant to the plot. Gibson’s Simon Stroud and his
partner Alberto Rodriguez, played by Al Madrigal (who is a really good stand up
comedian–check him out sometime) are pretty one dimensional. They’re your usual
FBI guys trying to figure out what’s going on with Morbius. They also know
about what happened in the Venom movies, so I’ll bet they’ll be showing up in
future Sony Marvel films like the next Venom movie and/or Kraven the Hunter.
Dr. Nicholas exists to be the father figure who dies. Dr. Bancroft is the Betty
Ross to Morbius’s Incredible Hulk. These characters aren’t useless, but are
about as interesting as a freshly sharpened pencil.
It’s films like Morbius
that point out what I dislike about Rotten Tomatoes. Morbius is not a really bad movie like RT implies with its score.
I’d say the C+ CinemaScore is a more apt rating than a 16% splat. To be even
more defensive, I’d say that the effects are cool, only some of the
performances are mechanical, and the plot is more by the books than
nonsensical. Morbius happens in a
just-fine way, and a film about a man cursed with vampirism should be a
little dark and depressing. I might make some people mad by saying Morbius is of the same quality as 2008’s
The Incredible Hulk, which has a
fresh Tomatometer score, but damn it, I’m gonna stand by what I think.
To bounce off of that thought into the conclusion of
this article, I’d give Morbius a
7/10. It’s flawed but fine and definitely not unwatchable. I would rent this
film from Amazon when it comes out and not feel bad about it. I still want to
see where this franchise goes and what will become of Sony’s Spiderman Universe. The only direction the Morbius series can go is up, and–thanks
to his power set–he isn’t vertically challenged. Just no more end credit scenes
please, especially ones that are really stupid.
SCORE: 7/10
Advent Seven 
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