I had notes that I took for this movie, with pointed critiques, jokes, and maybe something to say, but it is fitting that they fell out of my pocket at Hy-Vee, to brushed along with the refuse. I am left with what the movie provided in my memory - a vacant and numbing nothingness. Certainly nothing to sink my teeth into.
This flick is the most blatant example of “Why this movie?”, “Who is this movie for?”, and “Who wanted this?”. I get that Sony owns the rights to Spider-Man and his adjoining characters and after seeing the money to be made from comic book films, they are throwing sh*t at the wall to find out if it sticks. Unfortunately, Morbius was just a stain slid down the wall.
So little of this film was worth anything. The entire thing was exsanguinated from its cinematic lifeblood - entertainment, artistic quality, value of any kind. It seemed to almost take effort to make it like this, with such misses up and down the board.
Was the “vampire kinetic visualizations” diegetic or just a film expression to show what was happening? Who could know. I would also question the legitimacy of the vampire powers, like invulnerability or super strength, but I could vaguely buy them. The magic flying without any wings was, well…dumb.
Leto’s Michael Morbius was a completely unengaging milquetoast non-entity. He is surrounded by a co-worker love interest, who I think had a name, but certainly no character or charismatic connection, and absolutely no romance. There are the ineffective cops, with Tyrese (yes, that Tyrese) as the lead, that deliver SURPRISE: nothing. There is Jared Harris, the un-aging doctor that I guess is just present for slight exposition. The only one bringing anything or any enjoyment is Matt Smith, but his is an unexplained sociopathy and villainous nature that you just shrug at.
The brevity with which it forces things is astonishing. Essentially, the entire internal struggle that the Blade films use 2 films to tell and the transformative drama the Fly is made of is shoved in this film in a 5 minute voice-over monologue & montage.
For a film that should be all about ethics and arguing about should or shouldn’t, MM has no qualms whatsoever. He has no hesitation of breaking chimeric boundaries or the negative possibilities. He also doesn’t seem to have any empathy or problem with killing people for their blood, though he gives some lip service to it. It's more-sot an observable part of a science equation. For the “vampire who doesn’t want to kill” storyline, they created a sociopath mad scientist with no ties, only ambitions - completely missing the point.
The CGI vampire masks are terribly poor - like gloopy clayface muck. Not only are they poorly designed but are shoddy & unbelievable. The film struggles to be exciting, scary, funny, or even anything above vaguely coherent. It’s an underdeveloped and poorly realized mess.
“I’m hungry, and you wouldn’t like me when I’m hungry” is really more of you wouldn’t like me when I’m on the screen.
This weak garbo is topped off with probably the worst post-credit stinger scenes yet. Just vapid and shoved in, full of dumblines and even weaker connective material to some kind of franchisability.