Morbius

 At this point, I don't think there's any big studio out there with a worse track record for terrible, terrible scripts than Sony Pictures; They just don't seem to give a single fuck about storytelling. This has been clear for ages (Ghostbusters 2016, a movie I actually kind of like, seems to have been shot from an unfinished script; it's far from the only one), but it's never been clearer than with their latest slate of Spiderman Villain films: Venom is a movie that's so bad it's almost entertaining, and Morbius is somehow even worse than that.

 Jared Leto plays the titular vampire doctor with admirable conviction, but all his intensity and charismatic weirdness are wasted in a cliched and pretty staid character. He's got some sort of consumptive disease, he tries to cure himself by something something vampire bats, and of course he becomes a vampire. That's the level we're operating at here. Which... fine, it worked for the Spiderman movies, but they had a ton of other stuff going for them; here we get cut-rate CGI, poor acting, some of the worst script writing I've seen in a long time, and a bunch of weirdness that's kind of respectable in how wrong-headed it is. I mean, there's a bit where Matt Smith struts around in his pimped-out room, preening and making evil vampire faces at the camera not once, but twice. And it's filmed like a commercial or a fashion shoot! Besides the titles, it's the best part of the movie.

Vamp's gonna vamp. Wish more of the film had as much fun as this bit.

 Smith plays Milo, Morbius's childhood friend turned antagonist. Since Morbius is one of those saintly characters that is always on the right, they had to introduce some conflict somehow, right? Matt Smith ratches up the camp admirably, but the film doesn't have the wit or verve needed to actually make his character fun. They fight a bit, Morbius kills him, then it's time to start setting up the sequel and a Sony Villains Assembled film that nobody in their right mind should want.

Every single scene in this film is weirdly truncated, the storytelling so blunt it can't be arsed to thread scenes with any sense - it's just going through the motions, trying to get through its shit story as quickly as possible with seemingly nothing but contempt for its characters or the audience.
  Much as I hate the scripts for some modern superhero movies*, they're at least seem slick and maintain a pretense of professionalism. This... does not.

 Beyond the incompetent pacing, you get all the expected dumbness and then some. This is a movie that handles exposition by having characters telling each other things they both already know, that transitions from the line "that's so illegal that we should do it in international waters" to a shot of an ocean liner with a title card saying "International Waters". It has a father figure (poor, poor Jared Harris) who's only there to dramatically die in someone's arms, and a "touching" scene where a villain who's been an irredeemable piece of shit the whole movie goes for a grace note that's so unearned it plays as comedy.

 There's at least an attempt to give the movie some interesting visuals, which mostly come down to giving the characters a kind of trail that looks like ropy coloured smoke when they jump and shit, and an echolocation effect that applies a similar mist effect to any surrounding structures. It didn't work for me at all - I found it to be a butt-ugly movie that looks remarkably videogame-y.
 And don't get me started on its (quickly abandoned, I think) attempts to cultivate a horror movie atmosphere. Matter of fact, while we're discussing horror credentials, Blade proved that you could have a successful Marvel movie and keep it gory more than twenty years ago. This bloodless PG-13 crap was never going to cut it. For Shame.

 They do have Morbius do some bat shit I haven't seen Batman do, including hanging upside down for a bit, and getting swept around in currents of wind; I don't think the writers understand echolocation (or, more likely, they don't give a flying fuck.) The first time Morbius uses it, he doesn't screech to get the echoes back, which is a huge wasted opportunity - that would have been hilarious! Now I think of it maybe he's meant to be getting the echoes from his fishtank bats? Still stupid, and much less fun.
 If I may make a humble suggestion for the sequel, maybe Morbius could fly into someone's house, and they would have to shoo him around with brooms until he found a window he could fly out of? It'd make for a hell of a dramatic setpiece. I'd watch the hell out of that.

 Anyhow them's the breaks with Sony. I had extremely low expectations for Morbius, and the film duly lived down to them and then some. I wouldn't say it's so bad it's good, but it did made me laugh out loud a few times. If I have to be honest, I prefer proper bad like this to mercenary mediocrity like Ghostbusters Afterlife or plain old shitshows like Uncharted.

Because I'm feeling magnanimous, let me list a couple of other things I actually liked about Morbius besides Matt Smith's glam scene:

- The title sequence and end credits kick ass, a neon laser-show-like display that had nothing to do with the rest of the movie but looked really neat.
- The movie is only one hour forty-four minutes long, which is about half an hour shorter than superhero movies inexplicably feel is the minimum runtime these days.
- Obligatory love interest Adria Arjona is very pretty, and Jared Leto is as usual a good-looking, charismatic weirdo. The acting is bad across the board, but with this material I wouldn't pin the blame on the actors; No amount of Brandoing or Day-Lewising is going to elevate this shit.

 And that's it; Morbius out.

*(And if you thought I'd miss a chance to fling some feces at the Russo bros or Snyder, you don't know me well enough!)