Morbius

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)

I watched it out of compulsion because I'm sick of comic book movies, and how can I say this, somehow I survived unscathed. Mostly surprisingly intimate, holding back, taking place mostly between interior walls in the space of a few rooms. It doesn't have any eye-candy moments that make it memorable, it's just the whole inoffensive definition of mediocrity. Jared Leto was okay, as long as he didn't just make himself look like a vampire thanks to the ugly CGI, he acted artfully and wasn't the weakest link. It just that unfortunately it has a ridiculously cringing Matt Smith, and it has Tyrese Gibson looking like he's expecting diarrhea at any moment the whole time. The final CGI fight, drowned in darkness, is forgotten within five minutes. Like the whole film, actually. (10/24/2023)

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)

Honestly, did anyone expect Morbius to be a good movie? The trailers didn't suggest anything of the sort, and after how Venom turned out, it's not a bad thing to be wary when it comes to Sony comic book movies. So talking about disappointment wouldn't make much sense, the film exactly as crappy as most of us probably expected. Like Venom, Morbius feels like a comic book movie from the days when Ben Affleck as Daredevil and Nicolas Cage as Ghost Rider were goofing around in theaters. Simple entertainment with a simple story, realistically about six characters, no surprises, no ideas and nothing worth paying attention to. Moreover, Jared Leto is no Tom Hardy and while he doesn't spoil anything here, his Morbius simply isn't an interesting character, but that's more the fault of the writers who occasionally try to bite on some attractive themes, anti-heroics and a potentially interesting relationship between the main character and the villain. In the end, however, they ignore all that and serve up a boring film that has nothing to offer in real terms. And when they start to try for some kind of bigger story at the end, it still doesn't work. Oh, and the vampire faces are pretty ugly. (03/30/2022)