It has been a long while since Morbius was supposed to come out. Sony has been working this for years and it has been delayed for several reasons. However, this film, the Living Vampire from Marvel Comics finally came out, and, sadly, it is a huge step down.

Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) had a lifetime debilitating disease that would eventually kill him, but, the genius doctor, was determined to find a cure for himself and his childhood friend Loxias “Milo” Crown (Matt Smith). His idea was to match up his human DNA with DNA from bats.

His plan had an unexpected twist, giving him vampiric powers and a desperate thirst for human blood. Realizing the sad fact that, as a doctor experimenting on himself, it ALWAYS goes badly, Morbius tries to hide himself away until he could reverse the curse.

Little does Morbius know that his best friend Milo has other thoughts on the situation.

This movie, for a super hero-vampire story, was really quite boring through most of it and devolved into a unsatisfying slugfest at the third act. Morbius certainly learned his powers quickly, and he developed interesting uses of them without much effort.

Jared Leto was fine, but not very interesting. Matt Smith seemed to be hamming it up all over the place, which did not feel like the same character we saw during the childhood flashbacks. Good old Milo became certain ways depending on what the plot required of him, which is a drawback to the character.

Tyrese Gibson and Al Madrigal play FBI agents called in on the case and are there for… reasons. They brought little to the story. Morbius’s lady friend was played by Adria Arjona and she was about as uninspiring as you are going to find. She was attractive, but lacked in the character department.

The special effects were pretty bad. There was a ton of shaky camera that led into frozen shots that looked just terrible, like weaker video game quality. Though the character design of Morbius looked pretty decent most of the time, any sort of action was terribly filmed and was not engaging for the audience.

The film also seemingly had edited out any references to the Spider-Man universe from the main film, despite there being a heavy push in trailers to link Morbius to Spidey. There were several scenes from trailers involving Michael Keaton as the MCU’s Vulture, Adrian Toomes and he is nowhere to be seen in the main film. They tossed him into two of the worst mid-credit scenes you are ever going to see. The mid-credit scenes are so desperate that they were clearly taped recently and tossed into the film in hopes of connecting to No Way Home. They were sloppy and rushed.

Morbius is a terrible disappointment as I have always enjoyed the character in the pages of Marvel Comics and he would have fit well in with several of the new characters being introduced in the MCU (such as Moon Knight or Blade), but I do not want any part of this Morbius in the MCU. Keep him in the Sony Spider-Man-verse. This does not inspire confidence in all of the other projects that Sony has been preparing that does not have Marvel Studios there to help with creative. Morbius is a mess.

1.5 stars