Morbius (2022)

Johnny Knows What’s Up

I can see the future. Soon after I’ve added this review to Rotten Tomatoes, someone (or several someones) will post an indignant comment below, questioning my sanity—or at the very least my credentials as a film critic.

70/30 odds it will be in all caps.

How, this concerned troll will wonder, could I spend 3,300+ words trashing Matt Reeves’ The Batman, while devoting even a pixel of praise to Daniel Espinosa’s ill-conceived and never-requested Morbius movie?

By the end of this review, I hope at least you’ll understand.*

Johnny does.

I skipped the Morbius press screening and paid fourteen bucks like everyone else to see it on opening Thursday, which is where I met Johnny. He was young, very high, and used the word “yo” as punctuation. I wasn’t really aware of him as a person until the end credits began to play,* at which point he tapped me on the shoulder and asked,

“Yo! Who you think it’s gonna be?”

“Huh?”

“In the end, yo! They always got the, like, special appearance an’ shit.”

“Oh, I dunno. I heard there’s at least two in this one.”

“Two what?”

“End credits scenes.”

By this point, the first mid-credits scene had begun and Johnny was confused. He kind of recognized the actor on screen but wasn’t sure how. I explained who he was, and what other Marvel movie he’d appeared in.

“Oh, shit! That’s right. That’s dope as hell, yo! Y’know, they should get all the Marvel guys together in a movie, man. Like in the cartoons. Have Fantastic Four and the X-Men and Spider-Man. Yo! What if, like, fuckin’ Wolverine fought Morbius, man?”

I gave a quick overview of how Marvel had sold its character rights to various studios in the 80s and 90s, back when comic book movies weren’t anything like they are today—only to buy them back decades later in an effort to bring all their properties under one mega-profitable in-house banner. So, yes, within five years, I explained, Johnny would likely get to see Reid Richards fighting Thanos Jr. or whomever.

“Yo, I like the way you think about shit. It’s like real detailed. That shit makes sense, yo. But I still think they should have all the characters in one movie.”

Soon the second post-credits scene came on. Like me, Johnny understood exactly what he was seeing, but neither of us could understand why we were seeing it. Despite what you may think, it was the opposite of frustrating. We considered it a beautifully weird mystery that might one day be solved for us. Or, we figured, it could be easily forgotten dead-end fan bait.

(Same goes for the rest of the movie, really.)

As we waited for the final post-credits stinger (there wasn’t one), Johnny talked about how much he dug Morbius. He liked it a lot more than both Venom movies, and thought it was cool that Marvel was doing something new with horror. I told him I agreed, and later as we walked out of the auditorium together I realized that I’d made the right decision in coming out to see Morbius with the people instead of with my fellow film critics.

In the weeks leading up to the movie’s release, I imagine folks like Johnny were excited for a new Sony-verse adventure. Would there be a direct connection to Spider-Man: No Way Home? Or would this just be a cool vampire action movie in the vein of Blade?

Meanwhile, I’d waded through (and, [raises hand guiltily], joined in) endless tiresome discussions and articles about how the film was destined to be Sony/Marvel’s first gargantuan flop, based solely on criteria like star Jared Leto’s over-the-top performances** in House of Gucci and Suicide Squad; the screenwriters’ troublesome filmographies; Matt Smith’s apparent confusion regarding his character, and the fact that the idea of an undead supervillain is beyond lame. There was blood in the water before the first wound, which is usually a sign that a movie is about to be unfairly maligned.

Is Morbius good? I would classify it as “okay”, which in some circles translates to “bad” (and even “irredeemably awful”). The further I get from it, the more its flaws seem crippling, but I admire the spirit that Espinosa and company brought to the project, which, I’m convinced, was nearly destroyed by a meddlesome and cowardly studio.

More on that in a bit.

The movie follows Dr. Michael Morbius (Leto), a world-renowned hematologist who has dedicated his life to finding a cure for the rare blood disease that afflicts him and his childhood friend, Lucien (Smith). Deep in the jungles of South America, he discovers a colony of vampire bats whose DNA may hold the key to reinvigorating diseased tissue. It’s junk science, of course, especially since I’m pretty sure splicing human and bat DNA doesn’t grant the recipient the ability to manifest wispy, colorful clouds of pseudo-teleportation signatures in mid-air (think a Mardi Gras version of Nightcrawler’s “Bamf!” powers in X2).

But if we’re going to nitpick horror movie science on a cellular level, we could just as easily call bullshit on “Brundlefly”.

As you know from the trailers (or the premise), Morbius’ experiment leads to mixed results. The frail, pale, bone-thin scientist becomes a buff dreamboat with a bona fide healing factor, insane reflexes, and…an animalistic thirst for blood—which he unleashes on the crew of mercenaries he’d contracted to secure the steamer ship in which he conducts his unethical research on international waters.

The multiple homicides cause problems for Morbius and his would-be girlfriend, fellow scientist, Martine (Adria Arjona), putting the FBI on their trail and leading to Lucien’s learning of his friend’s “success”.

Of course, you can see where this is going. Lucien steals the formula and abuses his newfound powers; Morbius has to stop him; the bumbling feds provide little more than half-hearted comic relief, and Martine gets damsel-ized in Act Three (despite the film giving her a solid show of being a supportive yet independent character until the last possible second).

What you may not predict, and what I feel has been lost in the endless, tiresome pile-ons by crossed-arms critics, is the degree of care that the filmmakers put into building a unique Marvel universe protagonist. Sure, Michael Morbius has the science-gone-wrong powers of a Spider-Man or a Hulk and the million-IQ-but-zero-people-skills of a pre-Iron Man Tony Stark, but there’s real tragedy in his story, which peeks through the ripped corners of this well-worn yet enjoyable comic book movie.

Take, for instance, one of Morbius’ motivations for finding a cure. Yes, it would potentially heal his unreliable legs; yes, it could benefit millions of other people in countless ways. But it would also mean that he wouldn’t need blood transfusions three times a day. The revelation passes by in a snippet of dialogue, but stopping to consider what this character goes through—and the stamina and drive required to become a Nobel Prize winner in spite of that constant derailment to his personal life and professional schedule—it’s enough to make even cynical reviewers like me think, “Damn, I hope this works out for him.”

The irony, though, is that vampirism requires Morbius to drink copious amounts of blood in order to survive—on a schedule, he soon realizes, means four “transfusions” per day instead of three.

There’s also some fine drama between Morbius and Lucien (who, for cosmically sad reasons established early on, is called “Milo” throughout most of the movie). Matt Smith plays Lucien as a man approaching middle age whose considerable intellect and resources have not managed to offer one bit of hope to the rot that’s slowly growing inside his body. His heel turn can be seen from space, but the 45 minutes leading up to it are a nice compliment to Leto’s search for a cure; I got the feeling Morbius was, at times, more interested in saving his friend (who had been severely bullied as a kid) than in what the research might mean for himself.

Post-”cure”, however, Lucien goes completely off the rails—and brings the rest of the movie careening into the Valley of Death with him.

Between the rushed murder of a father figure’ the CGI slug-out between two swooping arch-enemies who’d barely had time to develop a true hero/villain rapport, and an ending stacked twelve-high with multi-layered nonsense, Morbius not only fails to stick the landing—it misses the narrative runway by a country mile.

Here’s where the studio comes in, head hung low and charged with murder.

One of the first things you’ll notice, if you’ve seen any of the trailers, is that the film is stuffed with partial scenes. The previews tease an entire climax that never manifests; a playful button on the “I. Am. Venom” line, and what appears to be the lead-up to Morbius’ controversial Nobel Prize acceptance speech—which is referenced in dialogue after the fact, but cut off, while the good doctor is still seated on the stage.

The second thing you’ll notice, if you haven’t figured it out already, is that there appears to be a much longer (and, I’d imagine, richer) cut of Espinosa’s film languishing in the Sony vault. There is so much thematic and connective tissue that I had to fill in while watching this thing that it’s no wonder people will call me crazy for going to bat for what is, essentially, an incomplete movie.

When we cut to Lucien doing a going-out-on-the-town dance for minutes on end (like Patrick Bateman re-enacting Spider-Man 3’s jazz club scene), it’s unclear why such a goofball moment was allowed to remain in an under-two-hour comic book movie. The answer, I suspect, is there was a lot more to his emergence as a villain (a dark mirror of Morbius’ super-powers test-drive montage). Like most other major plot threads in Morbius, it was whittled down to near-impressionistic impracticality.

Same with Tyrese Gibson and Al Madrigal’s four-steps-behind feds. Same with Jared Harris’ role as the head of a kindly home for ill children, who becomes Alfred to Lucien’s bedsore Bruce Wayne. Same with whatever the hell was going on with Martine in the movie’s final moments.

Even the opening and closing credits are the work of an exhausted, compromised, and confused creative team. These are truly the worst titles ever slapped onto a comic book movie—so bad, in fact, that I recommend ducking into a Morbius screening the next time you’re at the multiplex, just to see how blandly the film was announced to the world. Imagine pitching The Neon Demon as a CW drama before you’ve cast a single actor, and you’ll get the idea.

I wasn’t a fan of Espinosa’s Alien ripoff, Life. I didn’t bother with co-writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless’ Gods of Egypt or Power Rangers (though I thoroughly enjoyed the duo’s work on the goofy but serviceable The Last Witch Hunter). But I always try to approach new movies with an open mind, regardless of what the filmmakers may have done before (this applies to creators whose work I love, too). In the case of Morbius, I saw bits of a really promising story that were atomized for the sake of a slim runtime. Nowadays, two-and-a-half-hour comic book movies are reserved for proven brands, I guess, and someone forgot to set those parameters at the script stage.

So, yes, I’m officially “mixed-to-positive” on Morbius. In its current state, there’s a lot to be desired, but I feel the same way about The Batman. For all the talk of Morbius inartfully recycling old comic book movies, there’s a delicious Type O hypocrisy when it comes to Reeves’ Dark Knight caper, which not only uses an identical set of villains from thirty-year-old Batman sequels, but also proudly displays a brooding, one-note lead and third-rate David Fincher aesthetics and plot points.

My fellow critics and I largely wrote off Joss Whedon’s version of Justice League, but a number of us (not me) were won over by the re-tooled Zack Snyder’s Justice League a few short years later.

If comics movie fans can rally legions to demand that WB dump millions of dollars into putting out a twice-as-long, black-and-white version of a reviled film—based solely on the fact that they’d resonated with something in the original cut that they knew could be shaped into an actual movie—I feel comfortable saying that, as-is, Morbius is good enough to warrant further interest.

Few people besides Daniel Espinosa have actually seen the film as advertised, and I think I speak for both myself and Johnny when I demand, "Release the Morbius cut!”

*Except for one moment in the middle of the movie when I shot an angry look up and over my shoulder to silence his annoying cellphone conversation—only to realize he wasn’t on the phone.

**I’ve never understood the Jared Leto hate. Sure, he was the worst Joker, and gave, by many accounts, a sub-Mario Brothers performance in House of Gucci, but he’s also an Academy Award-winning actor. Once lauded for roles in The Dallas Buyers Club, American Psycho, and even his breakout role on TV’s My So-Called Life, he’s become a media punching bag. So what if he’s an oddball in real life, or an obnoxious space cadet on late-night talk shows? He’s a talented actor who invests fully in his roles—some of which turn out to be a bit too big for anyone’s taste.

But a good deal of that blame must be laid at the feet of the director and the studio. They auditioned, hired, and guided him through a particular kind of performance that someone at the top felt was exactly what their film needed. Half a dozen people on each project would have been invested with the power to cut him loose at any time if he’d not gelled with the filmmaker/studio’s overall vision (and if they were too stupid, lazy, or scared to fire Leto—for whatever reason—that still largely absolves the actor of blame).