It's probably less artistically bankrupt than your average MCU sequel tentpole, and, on balance, not massively worse that the phase-four MCU at large – but with those movies, the studio suits at least seem to care a certain amount about keeping up the appearance of basic functionality. Say what you will about Spider-Man: No Way Home or Shang-Chi (and I have a lot to say about them, very little of it good), but they are, for all their perfunctory plotting, slapdash direction, terrible lighting, and incoherently edited action scenes, fundamentally watchable affairs. By contrast, their Sony equivalents seem to be put together with very little appreciation for the fact that people will eventually watch them. (Is it the lower budgets? But then, they all still cost the amount it would take to make five to eight Green Knights, so I'm not really willing to cut these productions a lot of slack on financial grounds.)

At the best of times, this apparent lack of quality control gives us something as appealingly off-kilter as the (still underwhelming) Venom: Let There Be Carnage. At its worst, you get Morbius, a movie with a fun enough premise that gradually deteriorates from silly nonsense (he harvests bats in Costa Rica! the ship is called Murnau!) to protracted bore to barely functional franchise filmmaking (those mid-credits scenes are truly horrendous). The storytelling is so all over the place, the sequencing so poor, the narrative progression so rushed as to be downright impenetrable at times, the climax so laughably short, that I could swear they were struggling to scrounge together enough filmed material to manage even a semi-intelligible movie.

At the end of the day, I can't even say I hate this movie. It's just really not good.