Morbius

After the Venom movies, Sony Pictures continue chasing twenty-year-old cinematic dead ends, wishing to make sales only by sticking the popular Marvel brand name all over their product. However, if you strip this brand away from Morbius, you are left with the equivalent of all the cheesy direct-to-video vampire rubbish with bad actors and even worse special effects they used to release back in the day that flooded the cheaply produced DVD market around the year 2000 after the success of Blade. Few people were interested back then and no one is really interested now. At best, Morbius is just a bland, oft-seen comic book origin story with only the simplest conceivable plot. At its worst, it is a total cringefest with special effects and CGI reminiscent of a pixel holocaust. Uwe Boll would have approved. (03/30/2022)

Regarding the qualities of Morbius, there is a lot of mention of the Venom 2, which was qualitatively on the edge of average and subpar, but at least it tried to be funny and sometimes it succeeded. Morbius doesn't know who and what it could (and should) impress with! Espinosa's film is neither action-packed, nor scary, nor – as I mentioned – funny enough. It has a punishingly short running time, so you watch a sequence of randomly arranged scenes, all without causality or logic. In terms of visual effects, this is a dud by contemporary standards – the vampire look is more creepy than horrifyingly scary. Even the “smoke moves” of Nightcrawler in X2 were better done than Morbius and co. Jared Leto tries his best, but the bad script trips him up every step (or jump), while Matt Smith was downright embarrassing. The rest of the cast was just sort of pointless filler. I'm curious to see if Morbius will appear on the big screen again after this below-average piece, given the (rather) tepid title end credit scenes. (04/02/2022)

I am Manbat! Jared Leto in a strange variation on a dime-a-dozen Spiderman baddie & unknown Batman baddie is seriously bad. The senseless decisions, unclear motives and questionable rules for the functioning of this entire newly created universe are pitiful. The idiotic screenplay manages even to kill any potentially intriguing storylines and the nicely set up hero/baddie relationship is destroyed unexpectedly amateurishly. The obviously heavily cut ending with the footage of Keaton indicates that Morbius is for teenagers and movie consumers who don’t like to use their minds. (09/02/2022)

Morbius in the end is not as bad as everyone originally announced, but at the same time it is definitely not as good as we hoped. In the context of the Marvel franchise, it's clearly one of the worse pieces and actually has very little to do with it (see below), but as a standalone film, it's a digestible actioner that doesn't dazzle too much, but doesn't bore either. The problem is that Morbius doesn't stand out for much of anything, and so it will likely be a forgettable affair for several reasons. The acting is average, the vampire make-up doesn’t impress, the story is clichéd, the humour is completely absent, there is no connection with other characters, the action isn't groundbreaking and the CGI is awful – I didn't mind it at first, but as time went on more and more of it was added until the finale turned into a giant digital mess. The slow-motion scenes get overwhelming after a while and start to annoy you as well, the villain is boring, bland and without a proper motivation. Simply a terribly superficial affair that didn’t bore me, but I wouldn't recommend a cinema visit. A huge misstep by the standards of superhero movies, but I liked the post-credit scene, and quite a lot, so we'll see what interesting things Morbius brings us in the future. Either way, the film is further proof that the Marvel brand is not a guarantee of quality, but it's about the person sitting in the director's chair. I was originally leaning towards three star, but the botched finale and the idea of how good this anti-hero could potentially be made me stick with two. (03/30/2022)

While it doesn't match the qualities of its MCU neighbors (but it's better than Black Widow and not much worse than the first Doctor Strange), Morbius is definitely better than both Venom movies combined, and that's mostly because of the characters. It’s a shame that they didn’t go further with the horror, because with this film and this protagonist they could have afforded it. I like that the trailers I saw didn't give everything away and actually kept the villain completely hidden until the theater, for example. And while he's not a great villain, he's a good one, and his motivations are presented in a fairly believable way, though in a slightly limited space. The action scenes aren't many, but they are there, and they don't turn into a cluttered mess thanks to slowing down time at the right moments. Jared Leto made a good impression on me in the lead role, I trusted the headstrong hero who refuses to give up his humanity. For me it was nothing ground-breaking, but a pleasant and inoffensive film, where, unlike the aforementioned Venom, I didn't have to be ashamed of what on earth I was watching. (04/01/2022)