Main cast: Jared Leto (Dr Michael Morbius), Matt Smith (Milo Morbius), Adria Arjona (Martine Bancroft), Jared Harris (Dr Emil Nicholas), Al Madrigal (Agent Al Rodriguez), and Tyrese Gibson (Agent Simon Stroud)
Director: Daniel Espinosa
Someone must really hate Jared Leto, because after letting him embarrass himself in the first incarnation of the Suicide Squad movie, they convinced him that he should do an encore of his self humiliation, this time as the titular character in Morbius.
Unlike the comic counterpart that often looks like a monstrous vampire-like creature, here Morbius resembles Jared Leto in homeless hobo mode, which I am really not sure is an improvement at all.
Now, Michael Morbius is born with a rare blood disease, and while attempting to find a cure, his experiments on himself turn him into a vampire that needs to feed on human blood, but with a twist: he’s not undead, hence the moniker “living vampire”.
In this movie, he and another kid, Milo, have the same disease, and they are adopted by Dr Emil Nicholas because movies like this need a daddy figure. Michael goes off to medical school and eventually becomes an acclaimed scientist, while Milo secretly funds his research on artificial blood that will hopefully cure the both of them.
Alas, Michael’s experiments turn him into the living vampire thing, and he ends up killing some people during his bloodlust. Oh no, this means he must hide the existence of his vampire-making stuff as well as the fact that he is a bloodthirsty killer.
Of course, the stuff also makes him super strong and agile and what not, but hey, I’m sure we are all heartbroken over the fact that he is a vampire now, boo-hoo.
Milo is understandably pissed that he’s left out of the fun, so he takes the stuff too—wait, why is Morbius leaving that thing around anyway?—and unlike the sad sack, he revels in being a vampire. We can’t have that, but Morbius can’t bring himself to destroy Milo when he has the chance, so Milo gets to go kill everyone Morbius holds dear. Yes, everything here is the so-called hero’s fault, yay.
Seriously, I’ve described almost the entire movie and there’s still nothing noteworthy about this thing, as its story is clumsily cobbled together from every conceivable action schlock stereotype and overused plot device out there.
That’s the biggest tragedy of this thing. I’m late to the whole party, as I need a break after watching way too many cape crap shows one after another for my own good, but I’m told that this movie is so bad that it transcends the definition of the word “bad”. There are also so many memes of this thing out there, and the fact that the movie is released twice only to bomb twice the amount is hilarity compounded.
However, when the end credits finally roll, my reaction is a yawn of relief that this hopelessly mediocre and forgettable bore is finally over and done with. No, really, if you ask me what I remember most out of this thing, it’s probably the terrifying “transforming into a vampire” scene that makes me realize that a monster Morbius still looks a lot like hobo Jared Leto with maybe a bit more make-up.
Oh yes, Morbius has an assistant, a character that is said to be inspired by the mentally impaired fraud Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but since I don’t see any crazy eyes and horse-sized overbite, I will chalk that up to fake hype to get crazy people on social media to talk about this movie.
Even the mid- and post-credit scenes are a waste of time, as they just drag in some villain without any plausible explanation under the delusion that there is going to be a sequel to this dull waste of time.
Overall, this movie flounders at everything. It’s not entertaining because story and the characters all feel like uninspired rehashes that I have come across so many times already, without anything done to make things even a little bit interesting this time around. It’s not good at being so bad that it’s amazing either, as the bad attempts at comedy are just lame and cringe-inducing while everything else is just a snooze.
Having to watch Jared Leto walking around like he’d never bathed since Christmas three years ago while acting like he’s even more over it than me is just bonus tedium to enjoy, while the seizure-inducing end sequence effects are the final middle finger to the concept of good taste everywhere.
I can only conclude that all the memes and clowning of this show on social media have to be some covert marketing by the studio to salvage this movie, because there’s nothing here remotely noteworthy to even clown about. Perhaps those folks that go the extra mile to make this thing appear so bad that it’s awesome should have been appointed to make this thing in the first place!
