Movie Review: Morbius

This sure was a movie. I feel like if this came out around the time of the early X-Men movies it would be a cult classic by now. There is clearly stuff missing throughout the movie as the trailers had a lot that were completely missing as well as various terrible editing choices throughout. As it is though, it’s a dumb fun B movie where everyone commits 150% to their role. For good or bad, Leto embodies this character of this weird sick doctor with an odd sense of humor who likes origami and that’s pretty much all his character traits. Matt Smith ate up his role as the Eleventh Doctor if he was a crazy evil vampire and he was a joy to watch. All the other characters were also in the movie but they barely had development (the forced love interest) and/or no resolution at the end (the agents).

The couple kids in the back row sounded like they had a blast with one of them imitating the vampiric “bleh!” sound several times and will likely be imitating Matt Smith’s little dance all weekend. The other four people in the theater had no reactions throughout the entire movie. This about echoes the numerous negative reviews that Morbius has garnered. I for one had a good time with this movie and laughed a good number of times both at the humor and at the absurdity of what I watching. I definitely think it’s being over hated by most of the reviewers who, I think, were only interested in any potential Marvel multiverse or Spider-Man connections and not that movie itself. Despite like 80% of the scenes from the trailers not being in the movie, I feel like this is pretty much the type of movie the marketing promised. This was never going to be as epic as something like Avengers Endgame or Zack Snyder’s Justice league or even a dark, noir, action drama like The Batman. The only recent comic book movies that could and should be compared to this were the two Venom movies which were also dumb fun action B movies.

Onto the technicals, Morbius had the worst editing I’ve seen since Suicide Squad (2016) especially in the first act where different scenes are spliced together in a very confusing way as well as throughout the movie where there are hardly every scene transitions. Things just happen then the next thing happens and often there’s no correlation between the scenes. There is an argument scene towards the end where there is clearly something missing from earlier in the movie as a lot of the dialogue comes out of nowhere and makes zero sense. The soundtrack seemed like the composer was hired last week and used tracks from The Dark Knight as temp tracks then left them in and added a couple extra notes to make it original. The visual effects were quite good though I was pretty tired of the vampire face effect by the end especially Matt Smith’s which I think needed another pass on to not look ridiculous. Also there was better color grading than the average Marvel Studios movie so I appreciated that.

Morbius was dumb, funny, occasionally serious and sometimes violent, but it is what it is and everyone (except the editor) totally commits to making this movie a solid 6/10.