Morgan (2016)

Directed by Luke Scott. Starring Kate Mara, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rose Leslie, Boyd Holbrook, Toby Jones, Paul Giamatti, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Sullivan, Michael Yare, Vinette Robinson, Jennifer Jason Leigh. [R]

Taylor-Joy goes from a Puritanical witch to an experimental synthetically-altered organism in this derivative sci-fi thriller. After the artificial being savagely attacks a doctor, the company sends a specialist (Mara, whose wooden portrayal transforms from suspicious to obvious somewhere along the way) to assess the risk involved in the operation, which leads to the expected violent results. Scott (son of Ridley, who co-produced) stumbles badly in his directorial debut, his stylistic choices being inconsistent, his confidence as both a dramatist and an aesthete shaky throughout; it’s hard to tell if he should share a sizable portion of the blame for the uniformly weak performances or the jagged editing that leaves the entire final third a disorganized muddle, but any attempt to “lead by example” must have been a disaster. Its fusion of disparate elements from dozens of genre films before it (Splice, Ex Machina, etc.) not only fails to find its footing, but offers nothing novel or fresh to counteract the increasingly dumb developments in Seth Owen’s screenplay (e.g., downtime between Morgan interactions often boil down to high school-level gossip and sexual advances) before it surrenders and turns into a series of bloody encounters where people we don’t care about start dropping like flies. A handful of walk-ons from Leigh as the doctor who’s attacked in the opening scene barely rates higher than a glorified cameo; for a legitimate cameo, check out Brian Cox showing up at the end…if you make it that far.

21/100