Once again, the Sony side of the Marvel cinematic landscape has released a film that has garnered… mixed reactions, let’s say. Much like with the first Venom, it has become yet another invented battleground for casual audiences to rail against The Critics™ (forgetting that we are all critics at the end of the day), with lashings of terrible official write-ups while the #MorbiusSweep movement… honestly, even in these post-irony days, I can’t tell if this is just a meme or if people are actually getting into this film. Unlike the first Venom, though, you won’t find me ‘picking a side’ in this particular pissing match. I don’t really get the intense backlash this has faced (well, mostly don't, but we'll get to that), nor do I think it’s an underrated gem worth white-knighting for. It’s just… okay.
Let’s start with the acting. Jared Leto, cult leader and abuser of the acting method, does a decent enough job as Michael Morbius, the scientist searching for a cure to a rare blood disease he has suffered from all his life, and his scenes where he analyses the… changes he’s going through after an experiment with bat DNA are pretty good. As Morbius The Living Vampire, though, the moral grey tones to his character often feel like afterthoughts, with a lot of the implications of him being this literal bloodthirsty monster staying surprisingly insular throughout.
The rest of the cast is at around or just below the baseline for ‘passable’ acting, with no-one really standing out… save for Matt Smith as the main villain Milo. I freely admit bias here, since Smith is my personal favourite incarnation of The Doctor, and seeing him go for more antagonistic roles recently in Last Night In Soho, Lost River, and hell, even Terminator: Genisys, has been quite interesting. But the level of energy and captivation he brings to the role is as satisfying as it is perplexing; it’s like he’s in a completely different film from everyone else. Where that fact gets even weirder is in how what his performance brings to this production is a lot like what certain villain roles brought to some episodes of classic Doctor Who: If the villain is entertaining enough, they can carry the entire cast on their shoulders for the duration.
From there, we have the script from Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, whose previous experience with vampiric cinema was with the equally-meh Dracula Untold, and who we last checked in on with Gods Of Egypt. Basically, as soon as I saw their names attached to this, I was fully prepared for another instance of being in the minority as far as liking their work. And while admittedly, I’m not as gung-ho about defending this as I was with Gods Of Egypt, I don’t see a lot wrong here either. Sure, like Venom, it’s almost a throwback to the pre-MCU days of superhero movies in how stripped-back it is, but at least it doesn’t feel like it’s only reviving the mistakes of that era. The main narrative to do with Morbius and Milo, their brothers-by-circumstance relationship, and their diverging views on their new existence (which keeps referencing 300 of all things, in a way that kinda works), is rather standard for vampire fare, but just on the strength of what Matt Smith brings to it, it’s more than serviceable for the runtime.
It probably helps that I really liked the visual style director Daniel Espinosa went with as well. The effects work on Morbius and Milo, both for the physical transformations and their new powers, is solid, even if seeing them both fly and generally vamp their way around New York has a very Nightcrawler-in-X-Men-2 look to it with the emphasis on shadows and everything looking like it’s evaporating into smoke. I like how they did the action scenes too, taking that formerly counter-intuitive hesitance to show the violence from the first Venom and using it to amp up the film’s horror cred. Not that this is all that scary, bear in mind, but that same approach feels like it was being done for an actual reason beyond abiding ratings guidelines.
But with all that said, there is one thing about this film that I genuinely did not like, and in all honesty, it’s something that could explain the highly negative reactions this film has garnered. I’ve mentioned in the past that the mood a film leaves you with, regardless of what it made you feel in the hour-plus preceding it, can have a hefty impact on one’s reception of that film. And in this case, we have what might be the most bass-ackwards post-credit scenes I’ve seen in the last decade and a half. Not just for superhero films, but for any film. They both involve Michael Keaton reprising his role as Vulture from Spider-Man: Homecoming, as the events of No Way Home bring him into the Sony-Marvel universe much as they briefly brought Venom into the MCU.
Now, I could get into how the treatment of this shift, from Vulture suddenly knowing where in the hell he even is to his eventual tracking down of Morbius and suggesting they ‘team up’, is a five-car pile-up of plot holes over the course of about a minute of screen-time. Or I could get into how this actively bucks against what the initial trailers presented regarding Keaton’s inclusion in this film, as if the audience is just meant to forget such things in the time it took for this film to actually see a release.
But instead, I’m going to point out how this post-credits scene shows Sony, even after all this time, still making the same stupid mistakes they’ve been making for nearly a decade by this point. They are so intent on making the Sinister Six a thing, after their first attempt off the back of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 didn’t happen, that they are willing to completely derail their own film just to try and set it up again. Where Venom was a showing of regression in terms of storytelling and just general grasp on the source material, this is regression in terms of the business side of things. I get that there’s a lot of money (arguably way too much) to be made with superhero films nowadays, and Sony’s been wanting to push their own shared universe for a while now, but they need to stop stacking all their chips on this one aspect of that universe and start thinking about how to actually expand what they have. They’ve already shown they know how to look forward to new territories with Into The Spider-Verse (and hot damn, am I looking forward to Across The Spider-Verse Part 1), so why they keep insisting on staring at their past mistakes with their live-action features is beyond me.
But again, even with how annoying that is, the film as a whole isn’t all that bad. I’d even argue that it’s worth watching just to see Matt Smith do his thing, and it’s not like it’s an uphill struggle whenever he’s not on-screen. Sure, the acting can be middling, the visuals might not work for everyone, and yeah, the end-credits thing is almost guaranteed to make audiences leave the cinema on an annoyed footing, but as a vampire movie first and foremost, it’s alright. I still think that Sony should be focusing a lot more on their Spider-Verse work than trying to strong-arm this other universe into existing, lest they keep making the same mistakes the DCEU made at first, but calling this one of the worst comic book films is a bit of a stretch.
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