Morbius Reviews On Rotten Tomatoes Are A Stake Through The Heart
Sony's new "Morbius" movie just hit theaters, and reviewers have already started sinking their teeth into it. Over on Rotten Tomatoes, the internet's leading film review site, people have been ripping the Marvel Comics-inspired superhero flick to shreds — with most saying "Morbius" is boring and inconsistent pretty much across the board. The negative sentiment echoes the early impressions about the Jared Leto-led project, which also stars former "Doctor Who" actor Matt Smith, as well as Adria Arjona, Jared Harris, Al Madrigal and Tyrese Gibson.
"Well, Morbius is about as bad as you were expecting," Collider's Sab Astley had previously said (via Twitter). "A 2005 plot collides with visually confusing CGI to create a bit of a snooze fest...Sony are off their rocker."
With other early reviews calling "Morbius" a number of different things, including "disjointed" and "messy," it was pretty clear that the Rotten Tomatoes critiques to come out after it's official release would be about the same. Here's what reviewers are saying...
Critics sink their teeth in Morbius, but they don't like the taste
There's really no way around it: The vast majority of critics on Rotten Tomatoes dislike "Morbius." In fact, it would be an understatement to say they merely "dislike" it. From the looks of it, reviewers seem to consider "Morbius" one of those rare movies that are such abject failures, they can only be reviewed with particularly colorful expressions and scathing terms.
For example, Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail states that the movie is so very bad that it might actually end up tanking the superhero movie trend. "If there is any justice in Hollywood, Morbius will be retconned to the margins of superhero cinema history. If the film doesn't bury the genre alive first, that is," he wrote.
Robbie Collin of The Telegraph didn't hide his thoughts about the movie's pointlessness. "The studio may have accidentally created the first Shepard film: it goes on for about an hour and 45 minutes, and right up until the second it ends, you keep feeling as if it's just about to start."
Other critics turned their blaming finger toward Sony, and expressed the belief that "Morbius" is a prime example of a movie that's intended to be a money-making machine, with very little inherent quality to speak of. "A cash-grab so sloppy it makes you wonder if the top brass at Sony are nihilistic members of the undead," Charlotte O'Sullivan of London Evening Standard wrote.
Meanwhile, others chose to take yet another approach by adorning their review with the exact same amount of creativity that they feel the movie features. "'Morbius' really does... *sigh* suck. Yes, we couldn't even come up with something more inventive, folks," Brian Lloyd of Entertainment.ie wrote.
Critics have little love for Jared Leto as Morbius
It's not just the movie's general quality that draws the reviewers' ire. Several critics have also pointed out that Jared Leto — who, as an Academy Award winner, clearly has a history of knowing how to act — doesn't quite manage to impress as the titular character, for various reasons.
According to Meagan Navarro of Bloody Disgusting, Leto simply fails to captivate in the same way as Tom Hardy does in his symbiote-filled corner of Sony's Spider-Man universe. "Without, say, someone like Tom Hardy embracing the weirdness of the character in 'Venom', it's tough to find rooting interest or muster any excitement for the vampiric bat man," the critic wrote.
Meanwhile, Stephanie Zacharek of Time felt that while Leto does bring an element of emotion in the movie, he "perhaps isn't so much a serious actor as one who takes himself very seriously." Oof.
Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune stepped back to look at the bigger picture, and found that when you combine "Morbius" with Leto's recent turn as Paolo Gucci in "House of Gucci," it can be very difficult to comprehend the actor's ways. "I don't relish pinning blame, or a tail, or horns, or anything on a particular star/executive producer, in this case Leto, since so much in corporate franchise commerce has a chance to go wrong before a single performer gets in front of a camera," the reviewer wrote. "But my bafflement regarding Leto is becoming chronic, and I'm still recovering from his opera buffa turn and Chico Marx dialect in 'House of Gucci.'"
All in all, whether the audiences find the movie or not, it's already pretty clear that "Morbius" won't go down in history as the most critically praised superhero movie of all time.