Hot off of winning his very first Razzie (congratulations, Jared), Hollywood’s biggest creep returns to the comic book movie genre as Michael Morbius, the vampiric C-tier Spider-Man villain who now has his very own solo movie. Morbius, the third feature of Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man cinematic universe without Spider-Man, is finally being released theatrically after wrapping filming almost three years ago. The question on everyone’s minds after all the delays and having seen the trailer fifty times at the cinema: “There’s no way it can be worse than the Venom movies, right?” The answer (maybe to no one’s surprise) is a definitive “Yes, yes it can be.” In what might be a new low for comic book movies, Morbius is a solemn reminder for big movie studios that just because you can make something doesn’t mean you should.

I’m uncertain where one even starts when talking about Morbius, especially considering the existence of the movie itself is a baffling enigma. Jared Leto plays the titular role of Michael Morbius, a scientist plagued by a disease that’s going to kill him someday. He believes he can find a cure using DNA from bats, so he injects himself with some bat serum, turns himself into a bloodthirsty vampire, and kills some people on a cargo ship in the most sanitized, bloodless PG-13 sequence imaginable. Morbius’ opening act highlights what is perhaps the biggest flaw of the movie: the story structure. Limping along from scene to scene, Morbius’ plot has zero rhythm or pacing to speak of. Scenes just happen. Things just happen. The characters’ motivations are confusing, to say the least, with the worst offender being Matt Smith’s villainous turn as Morbius’ childhood best friend. The character just decides to be evil at a certain point for no discernable reason besides the script saying it’s time for him to be evil. There’s a throwaway line about him being jealous of Morbius that comes out of nowhere, but at that point in the movie, it ultimately doesn’t matter. After all, it’s in the beginning of the third act, and we all know what that means for comic book movies of this caliber: the smashing of two action figures together in a bloated, muddy CGI battle where the hero faces an evil version of themselves with the exact same superpowers and abilities.

Taking place entirely on a greenscreen stage, the action in Morbius is on another level of unwatchable. The movie uses terrible-looking bullet-time shots as a crutch for its poorly choreographed fight scenes to the point that it would make even Zach Synder blush. It certainly doesn’t help that the visual effects look like something out of a last-generation video game. The actor’s CGI faces when they go vampire-mood is truly an ungodly sight to behold. The last 20 or so minutes of the movie somehow made me miss when the characters were speaking to each other with words, an especially impressive feat considering some of the line-readings in the straightforward dialogue scenes. I’m dumbfounded at how anyone at Sony allowed some of these takes to make it into the final release. Jared Leto is asleep at the wheel in what will easily go down as his worst performance. He has negative chemistry with Adria Arjona, who plays the thankless role of Morbius’ love interest. Arjona gets exactly zero interesting things to say or do in a role we’ve seen about half a million times in these movies. Matt Smith at least knows what kind of movie he’s in and dials the camp up to an 11.

As bad as the Venom movies were, they at least had Tom Hardy’s performance and his goofy Venom voice going for them. They found time for campy moments, like Tom Hardy in the lobster tank or Venom partying at the rave. Morbius on the other hand is self-serious to the point of laughter (and definitely not the good kind), with zero imagination or creative spark to speak of. Morbius might as well be called Late-Stage Capitalism: The Movie. Made to be a commercial product by a committee over at Sony Pictures, Morbius ends abruptly with a shameless set-up for a sequel that I can only hope never sees the light of day. I have two main takeaways after seeing Morbius in a half-empty auditorium on preview night. The first is that Sony releasing terrible comic book film after terrible comic book film just isn’t sustainable in the long run. The stan in me wants to be excited about the Madame Web movie with Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney, but by this point, we already have a fairly good idea of how that will shape up to be. I was initially against the rights for Spider-Man reverting to Disney (on the basis that monopolies are bad) but Sony’s output has me second-guessing that. Marvel Studios has had their share of flops, but nothing even close to the level of Venom and Morbius. The last thing I’ll say is this: the fact that we’ve allowed Jared Leto to have gotten this far in the movie industry says a lot about who we are as a culture. Perhaps we deserve Morbius 2 after all.

2/10