When I told my friends the latest movie I saw was Morgan, they each responded the same way. “Morgan? What’s that about? I haven’t heard or seen anything about it?” It seems as though Morgan failed in the advertising department, which is a shame since more people won’t know how bad this movie was. Morgan is a film about bioengineering a being for less than noble means and SURPRISE, SURPRISE, that turns out to be a pretty terrible idea for everyone involved. Created destroys creator, blah, blah, blah, this movie sucks.
Kate Mara plays Lee Weathers a risk management consultant dispatched by a corporation to assess the viability of their project/it (Morgan) after a violent incident. By the way, this corporation is wonderfully evil and competent; which is rare in this type of sci-fi. Imagine Weyland-Yutani if they weren’t run by complete idiots. Mara, who looks like a stone cold adult Buttercup from the Powerpuff Girls, is one of the few good things in the film. She’s cunning, brutal, lethal, and engages in some viscerally enjoyable hand-to-hand combat sequences.
Morgan (Anna Taylor-Joy) itself/herself is surprisingly, fairly bland. Yes, her grey ghoul palette and hood ensemble is creepy and unsettling at first. But this profile loses its effectiveness rather quickly as we spend most of the film just getting to know her/it before everything finally goes crazy and gets, you know, slightly exciting. The film’s reason for Morgan going crazy is they stopped letting her go outside. Why did they do this? Oh that’s right, it's not properly explained. Hey idiots, let the powerful, rapidly growing, bioengineered assassin go outside! Oops, I just spoiled the movie’s predictable plot. point: the corporation is trying to bioengineer the perfect assassin (don’t get pissy, you weren’t going to watch it anyway). The worst part about this is that the scientists working for the evil corporation know this, and some have even worked on previous projects that have ended horribly for similar reasons. Yet, these scientists still make such amateur and asinine mistakes that it's almost comical.
Most of the other characters, despite being “brilliant scientists” are short sighted idiots and deserve what's coming to them. Well maybe except for DEA Agent Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook). This film isn’t the least bit interesting or suspenseful. The story is fairly run-of-the mill, and it takes a while to get going. If you’ve seen the trailer it's fairly easy to predict what's going to happen, yet the film forces you to spend at least forty minutes waiting for Morgan to get loose and start doing some damage on the idiotic cast of supporting characters.
Morgan, despite clocking in at just over an hour and thirty minutes, is a waste of everyone’s time. Much of the film is spent just waiting for the titular character to break free and start wrecking stuff, and when it does, it's underwhelming. The film ends with an idiotic plot twist that’s as annoying as it is stupid. Despite the films’ blandness and predictability, it still has some decently brutal hand-to-hand combat scenes, and Kate Mara does her best to salvage this crapfest. Ultimately, though, this movie is one that you should skip, or one you probably didn’t even realize existed. It’s for the best.
TLDR: Morgan is a slow moving sci-fi movie about building a better human, that forgot about making a better film. 2/5Stars.