GameSpot headlined its Morbius review "Dead On Arrival" and then gave it a 5/10.

Let's start with the crime scene. The headline says "Dead On Arrival." The score says 5. On GameSpot's own scale, 5 is stamped with the word MEDIOCRE, which means average, which means the exact middle, which means the reviewer pronounced a corpse and then filed it under "fine, I guess." You cannot declare something dead on arrival and then rate it precisely as alive as everything else. That's not a review, that's a coroner signing a death certificate and marking cause of death as "room temperature." The math aint mathing.

So I did what the reviewer didn't and counted. The body of this review contains: "a bit of an odd duck," "things get even sillier," "deeply generic," "already dated," "bizarrely incongruous," "criminally squandered," "a non-character," "a non-event," "yet another forgettable one-and-done bad guy," and the phrase "absolutely fail" — a construction so absolute it comes with its own adverb bodyguard. Positive observations: Matt Smith puts in a "valiant effort." That's it. That's the ledger. Nine wounds, one participation ribbon, final tally: dead center. This is like weighing a feather against an anvil and announcing the scale is broken because both are objects.

The reviewer's own best line is the one that convicts him. He writes that the movie "has the same impact as a screensaver or a piece of motel art." That is a genuinely great sentence. It is also, numerically, a 2. Screensavers are not average art. Screensavers are the absence of art, running in the room where art used to be. If "you're probably going to forget you even saw it in the first place" scores a 5, then 5 has stopped being a number and started being a mood ring — a ruler made of soup, measuring nothing, agreeing with everyone.

Here's the real math crime. The 5 is the safest number on a ten-point scale. It costs nothing. It offends no one. It is the score you give when your prose has already written a 2 but your publication has to keep the studio's phone number. Downey did the hard part — he watched it, he found the images, he landed "non-character" and "non-event" back to back like a boxer who's already won. Then he got to the box at the bottom and typed the numerical equivalent of a shrug. The words did the autopsy. The number attended the funeral and said the deceased seemed okay. The math aint mathing.