A long time ago, I wrote about Superman IV: The Quest for Peace for our 1987 Week series, examining the good, the bad, and the ugly of that particular year in film as represented in equal proportion. For lovers of true low-down schlock cinema, ’87 holds particular significance: It was the year that the Cannon Group — the home of nutcase producers Menaheim Golan and Yoran Globus and owner of goofy masterpieces like The Apple, Lifeforce, and The Delta Force — began to truly collapse, with the one-two punch of Superman and the Dolph Lundgren Masters of the Universe not helping financial matters. Of course, they’d still have Albert Pyun’s Cyborg to release a few years later, but they were pretty much done for, given that the brightest stars can only shine for so long before they fade away and/or burn out. Their legacy lives on in a number of ways, but perhaps the most obvious among the bunch is in the Sony Universe of Marvel Characters, and not simply because both owned the rights to Spider-Man at one point. They make knowingly ridiculous and ballsy films as a way to separate themselves from their competition, scouring the bottom of the barrel for licensable characters and/or interesting ideas for movies. The Venom films feel like they could have been Cannon releases, especially Let There Be Carnage, and, as such, so does Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius.
The difference is that the Venom films are well-constructed and thought-through exercises in Goofball Cinema, hinging upon an unpredictable and perpetually funny performance from Tom Hardy as well as a hefty amount of queer subtext, while Morbius is slap-dash and chaotic, centered around Jared Leto, he of “Why the hell is he in this?” fame, and undoubtedly Frankensteined together from a hefty amount of reshoots. It unintentionally reaches the same conclusion as its predecessors did, which is to say that it’s an incredibly fun time at the movies, but good lord, is it a once-in-a-calendar-year mess, the kind of catastrophic failure that someone will eventually make a podcast about. There’s a reason that this movie has been punted throughout the pandemic release calendar like a football in a game in which both teams are perpetually going three-and-out at their own twenty, and it wasn’t just because Sony wanted to maximize their profits: it was because they were going to get a single decent weekend out of it before word-of-mouth smacked into this thing like it’d just made a joke about G.I. Jane 2.
Anyway, Morbius tells the tale of C-list Spider-Man antihero Dr. Michael Morbius (Leto), who was born with a rare genetic disorder that causes his body to collapse if he doesn’t have his blood cleaned and recirculated every few hours. After (accidentally) inventing artificial blood and subsequently rejecting the Nobel Prize, Morbius sets his sights on finally conquering the ailment that has left him crutch-bound by genetically merging the DNA of a human and a vampire bat. He is, of course, the first human subject, and the experiment works — he’s “cured” of his disease and is given some pretty crazy superpowers (he’s big and fast and can kind of fly if he balances on currents just right) but he also has an unquenchable thirst for blood, and becomes a bat-like creature when he starts to get the hunger. If he doesn’t pop open a couple of human bottles of Red Wine (or its weaker artificial equivalent) every few hours, he’ll turn back into his sickly self. Even worse, his best bud, Milo (Matt Smith), a rich psychopath still tended to by Morbius’s mentor (Jared Harris), has taken the formula as well, and is way more fun about the whole thing, killing clubgoers who make him mad and newspaper vendors who just so happen to say the wrong things about his pal. And, of course, Morbius is getting blamed for all of them.
Espinosa’s cut the film for pace, which is amusing in a few different ways. First, it dispenses with normal continuity in editing, with a whole lot of the film’s individual scenes feeling like training montages in a Rocky film, only missing some Survivor on the soundtrack. Second, it blows through the normal structure of the superhero movie, hitting each beat and barely taking a second to recover in between each one of them. Somehow, it feels both shorter and longer than Let There Be Carnage, which was only 90 minutes long, with how quickly everything moves being undercut by just how dumb it is on a moment-to-moment basis. There’s such little meat on the bone here plot-wise that it feels like everyone involved in the production got a checklist of beats that the studio wanted to hit and did their best to make that all that they did. What glimmers of weird passion show up — Matt Smith doing a goofy-ass dance (which I believe happens twice), Leto’s odd jumbled puns and jokes, the bizarre presences of Tyrese Gibson and Al Madrigal as cops who barely add anything to the plot but seem to be having a decent enough time, or an occasionally well-staged kill — seem as if they’ve been tacked on once everyone at the Sony brass realized that this movie was going to be dogshit, and if they were going to become a meme, well, they might embrace it fully. It’s somehow both po-faced and flippant, clad in faux-goth aesthetics and wonderfully-shoddy face-altering CGI that nearly begs for an IG filter of its very own.
Essentially, Morbius is a feature-length shitpost, with dozens upon dozens of individual moments ripe and ready for internet film communities to dig through and add to their forum or server lore. It’s about as cogent as trying to make a feature film of your Reddit front page on a particular day and equally as memorable. It’s catnip for dumbass film bros looking to go Tom Servo on a “bad” movie for the benefit of their date (and lord help her if that’s the case – hopefully, he’s either packin’ or got a lot of money if he’s gonna talk through this piece of shit while laughing at his own jokes) and will likely alienate and frustrate anybody just trying to do something fun on a Friday night without hearing a chorus of nerd laughter echoing throughout the theater. But for those who truly love themselves some garbage cinema — the same kind of connoisseur who happily bought individual Blus of Quest for Peace and MotU at full price — this is opening night viewing, provided you don’t have a shitty audience. God help you, because you’ll have an amazing time at the cost of your very soul.