‘Morbius’ tries to tell the story of Doctor Michael Morbius, a man who is trying to find the cure for an unspecified blood condition that he has by combining human DNA with vampire bat DNA. The experiment goes wrong and ends up turning Morbius into a living vampire, which is how the world ended up with Sony’s poor attempt at a film to set up more spinoffs and sequels surrounding other Spider-Man characters.
Sony’s previous live action Marvel movies, ‘Venom’ and its sequel, ‘Venom: Let There be Carnage,’ are stupid fun movies where you can tell that the actors and creators involved had a lot of fun with the material and never took themselves too seriously. ‘Morbius’ is just a stupid and nonsensical movie. Matt Smith looks like he is the only one who is having fun with his role, and it is unfortunate that he got saddled with such a mediocre script. Adria Arjona, who plays Martine Bancroft, is another standout. Jared Leto as ‘Morbius’ is boring and uninspired.

The pacing and the editing of the film are its biggest issues. There is not a lot of breathing room between scenes with characters to digest what you just watched. Going from scene to scene is a great way to keep the attention of the audience, but a bad way to tell a coherent and cohesive story. The run time is just under two hours for the audience’s benefit, but to the film’s detriment because there are hardly any resolutions by the time the film is over. The movie ends in the most anticlimactic way possible with the worst post credit scenes ever created on top of that.

‘Morbius’ would have benefited from an R rating because it is hard to have an action-packed vampire movie when the camera constantly cuts away from the action to avoid showing blood splatter in order to maintain a PG-13 rating. The action sequences are awful because the camera will cut away and focus on the falling debris around the characters or on a wall. The sloppy special effects also make visibility difficult.

The special effects in ‘Morbius’ leave a lot to be desired. In his vampire form, Michael Morbius looks like a cross between Voldemort and an Ork from ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ which could have been menacing if it was executed properly. It also makes you wonder how the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films had better special effects when they came out over a decade ago. The only time anyone laughed in the theater was during Morbius’ vampiric transformation because it looked ridiculous.

‘Morbius’ feels like an incomplete film that Sony did not know what to do with and tried to feed off the hype from ‘No Way Home.’ It is painfully obvious that a lot of scenes from the film were cut, especially if you watched any of the trailers. The mistakes made are unforgivable when you consider that this movie had over two years to fix them and was delayed more times than Marvel’s ‘New Mutants.’ Do not waste your money to go see this movie, although if you are truly curious about seeing it, you could always go to a matinee showing for a discounted price.