Morbius Review

This is not a catastrophe and there is no point pretending otherwise. Oliver Wood photographs it like a real film, the hospital sets and the tanker sequence hold up, and Matt Smith plays Milo with a relish the rest of the picture badly needs. When Smith is dancing alone in his apartment, enjoying his new body, there is briefly a movie here about appetite.

The rest is inert. Michael Morbius is written as a brilliant man who explains his own plot, and Jared Leto plays him quietly enough that the character never registers a want. Martine exists to be endangered. The transformations are rendered as smoke trails and speed blur, which reads as smearing rather than movement, and the two men fight in a visual language where nobody can tell who is where.

Dialogue is the flattest element. Almost every line delivers information, the jokes are announced rather than timed, and the attempts at menace land as statements of fact.

Then there are the post credit scenes, which import a villain from another studio's continuity, move him across through a gap the film declines to explain, and propose a team up that never happened. They are incoherent on their own terms and they end the picture on a shrug. The internet later invented a catchphrase the film does not contain, and Sony returned it to theaters on the strength of the joke, which did not work either. This lands at D rather than F: it is dull and generic rather than disastrous, and enough of the craft is intact that the failure is one of ambition.