Borbius

Morbius shares a lot in commen with its Sony Spiderman(less)verse cousin Venom in that its messy, unfocused and has clearly been hacked to bits in the editing room. What it doesn't have is the charm of Tom Hardy arguing with himself and doing his impression of Jim Carey in The Mask.

What you get instead is a passable but drab rendition of a mid nineties comic book movie, think way short of a Blade but better than a Spawn. Frustratingly, there are seeds of a much better movie here had the filmmakers invested the time in developing any of the threads they have going on. There is some actually quite gruesome body horror on show (Matt Smith was made for it) and had they leaned into it a bit more we could have had a genuinely unique superhero flick on our hands. There is also an interesting gothic tragedy buried in there but Morbius and best friend Loxias relationship is left pitifully underdeveloped so their parting of ways means nothing to the viewer. The script really needed to spend more time on hammering home their closeness and less on forcing a pointless romance with a female colleague. They may as well of put up some text on screen saying, "look Morbius is just FRIENDS with another guy OK, there's nothing gay going on there relax."

The film isn't a complete disaster and Leto does a pretty good job of giving Michael some personality but the absence of any meaningful stakes leads to a fairly boring hour and a half with the whole thing feeling like something Sony wanted to get out the way in their quest for some sort of team up movie in the future.

5 Morbintimes out of 10.

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