So bad, it's bad: 'Morbius' flops exactly as much as everyone says it does

Imagine yourself winning the Tour De France. As you cross the finish line and see the cheering crowds, you can feel the triumph and joy in your heart. 

It’s then that you take out a stick and shove it into your bike spokes, flipping over the top of the handlebars, landing face-first into a pie, stomach first into a whoopie cushion. As you lay there embarrassed and in pain, you look up to see every single one of your exes staring at you. 

That’s what it was like for Sony to release “Morbius” after the blockbuster that was “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”

“Morbius” came out on April 1, which is apt because it's a joke of a film. It might be the worst movie you see this year if you decide to waste your money on it. But don’t do that — just let this one pass by until it’s on a streaming service, and you can watch it to laugh at it.

The film is about Michael Morbius (played by Jared Leto), who is suffering from a terrible blood disorder that's slowly killing him. To fight this, he decides to splice himself with vampire bat DNA.

This goes tremendously wrong as it causes him to become a vampire, and Morbius must find a way to satiate his bloodlust while remaining human. His surrogate brother Milo Morbius (played by Matt Smith) has the same blood disorder and, soon, the same vampirism — but not the same qualms about taking human lives.

Everyone’s talents are wasted here. Leto is a celebrated actor, no matter what you think about his personal life, but the film gives him nothing to do. He has three modes throughout the movie: soft-talking, mugging for superhero shots or the CGI vampire face that the film just throws on him whenever it felt like it.

The only thing that can be said for sure about his personality is that he doesn’t know how to self-promote, like when he turns down the Nobel Prize for creating synthetic blood. Just throwing this out there that a lot of other departments could have used the funding being thrown at the hospital after that win, but hey, I’m not a vampire doctor, so what do I know?

The movie further wastes talent by making Adria Arjona — who played the aloof, charming and funny Anathema Device on “Good Omens” — a forgettable love interest, Martine Bancroft. Her only reason for being there is to move the plot along until she’s nearly killed later in the film. In a plot twist that surprised absolutely no one, she’s set to become a vampire in the sequel that will hopefully never come.

Smith is the only one having fun here. You can see him tap into his joyfully hammy "Doctor Who" energy as he chews the scenery. The problem is that every time he puts on his scrunchy vampire face, he looks a lot like the green-headed gangster antagonist from “The Mask.”

It rips you straight out of the movie every time they do it, and it’s done with such frequency you have to wonder why they didn’t just leave him with a permanent vampire face.

As a villain, Smith’s Milo has all the hallmarks of the older Marvel villains. He’s uninteresting, and the sum total of his motivations is that he’s the dark reflection of the hero. The only times he becomes interesting is when Smith shouts his lines at Leto as the two throw each other in boring, smoky fights that feature pointless Zack Snyder slow-mo shots.  

The movie is missing its entire middle section, going from the Morbius boys getting their powers and then to violence immediately. It has so many cul-de-sacs, like Leto’s Morbius going to jail only to be released minutes later after nothing happens. Then, we head toward the ending at breakneck speeds. The final fight is boring, meaningless to both the audience and the plot, and is resolved in a confusing way.

"Morbius" leaves so much on the table that it’s hard to find a way to fix it. You just want to take your arm and sweep everything to the floor and start again.

Even with copyrights getting in the way, Sony had enough characters to make a buck wild and fun story.  Even without established characters, the studio had access to vampires and superheroes — it should be a license to print money.

They could have made a movie about the fact that this man introduces vampirism into the world as a means to save himself and the moral issues surrounding that. Then in the next movie, because you have access to it, you could have Venom fight vampires.

It reminds me of how in “Independence Day: Resurgence,” the characters talk about fighting aliens in a guerilla campaign throughout Africa, and it makes you realize what a better movie that would have been instead of the one you were watching.

This movie is bad and done in the worst way possible. It’s not “Moonfall” bad, where they took a goofy concept and just had so much fun with it that you couldn’t help but enjoy yourself throughout the ridiculousness. It’s not “The Room”-level bad, where it’s so inept, incompetent and bizarre that it’s so campy and awkward that you need to bring your friends to see what was done.

It’s bland. It’s plain oatmeal eaten on a slice of ungarnished toast and washed down with a glass of room temperature water. You won’t be bored, you won’t have fun, you’ll just exist with this movie for 108 minutes. You’ll leave having only wasted your time with a thousand other things you could have done.