Moon Knight (Disney+): A TV Review

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A completely forgettable and unforgivable mess of a Marvel series.

Marvel has not exactly covered itself in glory in the wake of the staggering achievement that was the narrative arc which culminated with Infinity War/Endgame.

Black Widow and Shang Chi were rather generic Disney/Marvel movie ventures and Eternals was the worst film Marvel has churned out in its history.

The Spider-Man Sony/Marvel movies have fared a bit better at the box office, but even those have been pretty lackluster films, Spider-Man: No Way Home being the exception. The other Sony/Marvel movies, Venom and Morbious, have been pretty disastrous.

In this post-Endgame era, Mickey Mouse’s minions have tried to branch out from feature films to television, giving us a plethora of Disney + content that has been more miss than hit.

WandaVision and Loki were flawed but at least ambitious. Hawkeye was a more conventional work, but entertaining nonetheless. Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a middling misfire. What If…? an animated shitshow. And now there’s Moon Knight, which is easily the worst of the bunch.

Moon Knight is, like the lead character in the recent sorry Sony/Marvel movie Morbius, a bit of an obscure superhero in the Marvel canon.

Moon Knight is one of the superhero personas of Marc Spector/Steven Grant - a guy with a split personality. Spector is a rough and tumble American mercenary and Grant is an effete Brit who works at an Egyptian museum. Moon Knight is the avatar for the moon god Khonshu when Spector’s personality is in charge, and when Grant is in charge that avatar is Mr. Knight.  

If that all sounds a bit much that’s because it is, and Moon Knight doesn’t do much to quell the confusion.

Moon Knight is, like Morbius, a pretty fascinating character once you do the comic book reading necessary, but also like Morbius, the character is poorly served by the studio’s attempt to take him mainstream because the vehicle used is so atrocious.

The series Moon Knight, like the film Morbius, is an utter abomination it is so awful.

The series runs for 6 episodes, and yet it’s pacing is so bad, its storytelling so stilted, its action sequences so dull, it felt like watching a 40 hour death march.

The series takes its sweet time actually introducing Moon Knight, a fatal error as he’s the only remotely interesting thing in it. Instead, it plays coy with Steven Grant’s perspective, and actually cuts away anytime something interesting is about to happen and Moon Knight is supposed to show up.

When Moon Knight finally does arrive on screen, he is accompanied by the most egregiously choreographed, poorly shot and dismally edited action sequences you’ll ever witness.

And it isn’t just the action sequences, as everything about Moon Knight looks and feels cheap.

A huge problem with the show is that Oscar Isaac simply can’t carry a series on his own, as he lacks the requisite charisma and star power, nevermind the acting ability.

Isaac’s appeal has long eluded me. He is routinely terrible in movies (try watching him in those Star Wars pieces of shit) and yet people fawn all over him like he’s some great actor/movie star.

That said, last year I saw him in the Paul Schrader film, The Card Counter, and I thought he was fantastic. His performance was underplayed, subtle and riddled with complexity. Finally, I began to see what other’s saw in Oscar Isaac…and then… he turns around and churns out the embarrassment that is Moon Knight.

All of Isaac’s versions of Moon Knight, be it Mark Specter or Steven Grant, are dead-eyed, dreadful and dull. By the way, Isaac’s British accent as Steven Grant is Dick Van Dyke level of hackneyed.

Speaking of dreadful, Morbious was a truly dreadful movie and, ironically, the geniuses behind Morbious and Moon Knight are on the same creative page as there’s a sequence in Morbious that is copied in Moon Knight.

In the sequence, there’s a sort of horror chase through a hallway with corporate zone lighting in it where the only lights that go on are the ones immediately above the person walking. It was enormously amusing to me that Moon Knight used the same exact lighting technique in an equally flaccid horror chase scene. Apparently unoriginal minds think alike.

Another major issue with Moon Knight is that the whole Egyptian gods thing is a tough sell, as once you start getting into supernatural instead of superhero, things become even more silly than usual pretty fast. Eternals suffered from a similar failing.

And Moon Knight doesn’t seem to be connected in any way to the rest of the Marvel Universe, so the series feels even more irrelevant. For example, why when giant Egyptian gods are fighting and civilians dying, wouldn’t the Avengers get involved?

To me, the most remarkable thing about Moon Knight is how instantly forgettable it is, and how atrociously made it is.

But rest assured, despite Moon Knight being a major mess, Marvel still managed to get its weak-kneed woke agenda into the series. There’s one sequence where a little Egyptian girl says to Scarlet Scarab (a female Moon Knight-esque character - it’s a long story), “are you an Egyptian superhero?”, and she replies with pride, “Yes I am!” That sequence made me cringe so hard I nearly defecated.

But rest assured, all that virtue signaling garbage is just icing on the cake of awfulness that is Moon Knight.

The bottom line is that if Moon Knight is what the future holds for Marvel, then the future is bleak indeed.

©2022

Morbius: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This super-vampire movie sucks.

Unless you are a comic book aficionado, you probably had never heard of the character Morbius prior to the marketing campaign for the new aptly titled Sony movie, Morbius, that arrived in theatres this Friday. If you have the great misfortune of seeing this movie, you’ll no doubt wish you could return to that pre-Morbius golden age of ignorance.

Morbius is a D-level superhero in the Marvel universe. That doesn’t mean that he’s a useless character, he isn’t, in fact, having read a bunch of comics featuring Morbius I can say that he’s pretty fascinating and definitely worthy of a big screen adaptation…just not THIS big-screen adaptation.

Morbius is a rather unorthodox comic book character best described as a self-made, self-loathing vampire, basically a good guy who does bad things. But director Daniel Espinoza and screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless churn out the most generic and painfully bland film to tell Morbius’ tale.

Morbius’ background is that he was born with this painful and terrible blood disease that requires him to get complete blood transfusions three times a day. But he’s also a genius, so he develops a type of artificial blood, which earns him a Nobel Prize, which he refuses for some reason.

Morbius then turns his attention to a special kind of bat and trying to fuse the bat DNA to human DNA in order to help his blood coagulate. This leads to a bunch of scenes where Morbius, like Batman’s alter-ego Bruce Wayne, is surrounded by a cauldron of bats who, for some reason, accept him as one of their own. When Morbius then injects himself with bat/human hybrid DNA in order to cure his disease, it leads to very unexpected complications.

Morbius is a dark story, as he’s more villain than hero, but Morbius the movie not only can’t walk that archetypal and tonal tightrope, it ignores it altogether and like a blind, deaf and dumb Wallenda steps-out off of the ledge and falls ninety stories flat on its face leaving little but a blood splatter in the shape of a clown face.

Morbius is an incoherent mess of a movie that boasts atrocious visual effects, embarrassing action sequences, and utterly incomprehensible characters and plot. In short…this movie sucks, pun intended.

It’s striking how abominable the visual effects are in the movie, as Morbius’ super-fast movements are reduced to just color trails like in a Roadrunner cartoon. The only thing missing was a snarling, jagged toothed “Meep-Meep”. This approach renders all of the fight sequences utterly impotent. The rest of the film is just as visually mundane as the fight sequences and visual effects.

Across the board the cast are adrift in a drab ocean of lethargy, just like the ship in the film where Morbius does his experiments…which is named the Murnau – after F.W. Murnau the director of the classic vampire movie Nosferatu. Clever.

Jared Leto plays Morbius and coasts through the movie like a stoned Jordan Catalano at a first period math class. The impossibly handsome Leto has mastered the art of having his eyes be both beautiful and blank at the same time. I’ve seen Cigar Store Wooden Indian with more spark in their eyes.

Matt Smith plays Morbius’ childhood friend Milo, also a victim of the same blood disease, and it feels like he showed up from another, even worse movie.

Adrian Arjona plays Martine Bancroft, a doctor who is Morbuis’ co-worker/accomplice/love interest. Dr. Bancroft is not so much a character as a piece of furniture that talks. What is astonishing about Ms. Arjona’s performance is how relentlessly anemic it is. She may be the least charismatic human being to ever appear in a major role in a super hero film. Of course, the character is so poorly written as to be egregious so it’s not all Ms. Arjona’s fault that it doesn’t work, but she certainly doesn’t help matters.

Morbius’ failing may be a result of director Espinoza’s incompetency, or it might be due to too many Sony suits with too many bad ideas and too much power to make them happen. Or, and this is the more likely scenario, it’s an odious combination of the two.

No matter who’s fault it is, there’s no denying that this movie is, in its own D-level comic book character way, a disaster.

Unlike the rest of the Marvel characters which are owned by Disney, Sony controls Spider-Man and the “Spider-verse”, which includes a bunch of Spider-Man villains, including Venom, which has had two solo movies, and now Morbius, as well as Kraven, who has a movie coming next year.

Judging by the two lackluster post-credit scenes in Mobius, Sony is either trying to create a team of Spider-verse villains to take on Spidey and compete ‘solo’ against the MCU monstrosity, or it’s trying to develop more characters to sprinkle in to the MCU movies and share in the wealth. But if Morbius is any indication, Sony’s master plan faces a very steep climb and minimal chance at success.

The bottom line is, as good as Spider-Man: No Way Home was, Morbius is just as awful. You’d be more entertained using a hot spoon and a plastic straw to drain every ounce of blood from your own body than you will be sitting there for an hour and forty-five minutes watching this toothless cinematic venture.

©2022