Morbius (2022)

Michael Morbius (Jared Leto), biochemist with black metal musician hair, has been suffering from some rare and terrible, and supposedly lethal blood disease since birth. Obviously, he’s using his research for attempts to cure himself and other sufferers from that disease like his old friend “Milo” (Matt Smith). He seems to be on the right track, too, for he does indeed manage to use bat science stuff to cure himself from the symptoms of his disease. Alas, he also turns himself into a (living) vampire with a bad disposition as well as an insatiable blood lust. Michael, being a decent guy at his core, is very much unhappy with turning into a super-powered killer. Milo, on the other hand, is a-okay with being evil.

Given that the last superhero movie I watched that was supposedly not good at all turned out to be the rather great Eternals, I was actually somewhat optimistic going into Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius. Alas, this has all the problems Sony’s other Spiderverse movies made without the help of Marvel Studios have, and them some.

Problem number one is the script. It is credited to Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, both of whom were also responsible for Dracula Untold, Gods of Egypt and the “story” for that terrible Power Rangers movie, and so stay true to form. Even though I’m not as obsessed with “correct” plot structure as contemporary mainstream Hollywood scriptwriters usually are, I can’t help but think that writing a film whose middle act takes up ninety percent of its running time is ill-advised. Particularly when said middle act is full of scenes that have no business being in the movie at all – at least the version that somebody laughingly pretended to be the finished one to be inflicted on an audience – and do nothing, mean nothing, and are a slog to even get through. Characterisation generally makes little sense, pacing is non-existent, and there’s not a single scene to suggest anybody involved in the filmmaking had any concept of what its core ideas – yes, superhero blockbusters need those too – are supposed to be.

This godawful mess isn’t at all improved by messy, often genuinely bad, effects that have no business being in a movie in a budget bracket where competent craftsmanship should really be the absolute minimum to make the way to the screen. The action is generally murky, goes on too long, and is edited with random insertions of freeze frames and slow motion that are probably meant to be cool but show no sense for the proper pacing and choreography of action. In other words, Espinosa has learned nothing whatsoever since the execrable Life.

Our director also isn’t good at night time scenes at all, leaving things, dark, murky, yet also completely without a sense of atmosphere or place. Which turns out to be a bit of a problem in a movie that mostly takes place by night (even though it doesn’t actually need too, for Morbius has no trouble with daylight).

I could go on longer about the film’s problems, the distracted way it shuffles its female lead (Adria Arjona) on and off stage because it can’t come up with anything for her to do, or how Leto’s performance is very, very intense but also completely wrong for the film he is in, how lazy and phoned in every single aspect of Morbius is, but honestly, that would mean putting a lot more effort into the film than the actual filmmakers and the billion dollar company they are working for did.

In short: The Quiet Ones (2014)

By my count, John Pogue’s (spoiler) possession horror “based on true events” whose plot I find too tedious to synopsize, is by far the worst film the undead new version of Hammer studios brought out since it got serious about the whole filmmaking gig. (Of course, I wrote this before having seen The Woman in Black 2, my editing persona who has seen that film now adds with a shudder).

I do not base this assessment on Pogue’s technical abilities – the film’s a pleasure to look at, and while I don’t buy the POV horror parts as authentically made during the 70s, they mostly don’t fall into the worst traps of the style. In this case, it’s really all the script’s fault. The credits inform it’s by Craig Rosenberg, Oren Moverman, Pogue and “based on” the screenplay by Tom de Ville, which already suggests what the resulting film really turns out to be – a film full of undead parts of earlier drafts of the whole affair walking around without a good reason, and clearly without the involvement of anyone willing or able to clean the mess up and bring it to coherence.

So if you want to watch a film that knows what its theme is, you’re really shit out of luck here because there are suggestions of half a dozen thematic bases here none of which will then be actually explored or brought together with the other one’s in any shape or form. Thanks to this, The Quiet Ones is less a narrative but a series of false beginnings that never lead anywhere, with the film’s main interest clearly in providing some cheap, seldom bloody scares. It’s just too bad that scares can mean only little in a film that doesn’t have any actual context for them, a picture full of one-note characters who never act with any internal logic (I’m not against people under stress acting irrationally in movies but people’s irrationality is still connected to their personality, which the film’s characters alas just don’t have), and are slaves to the terrible whims of many a moments of It’s In The Script writing. Because it’s clearly more important to a film to put in some stupid plot twist, or three dozen loud jump scares, than to work from a script that is internally consistent, or meaningful.

Not surprisingly, the resulting movie is an exercise in frustration, with single scenes sometimes working quite well if you look at them as standing on their own but never cohering to anything, not even an interesting kind of incoherence, the supernatural here being about as anti-rational as a piece of soap.

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