MOVIE:
Morbius
WHERE TO WATCH:
Now showing in cinemas
OUR RATING:
2/5 Stars
WHAT IT’S ABOUT:
Dr Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) has devoted his life to finding a cure for the rare blood disease that afflicts him and his best friend, Milo (Matt Smith). After several not-entirely-legal but successful experiments with the modified blood of vampire bats on the same illness in lab rats, Morbius uses his new serum on himself. It works but with one significant side effect: it also turns him into a blood-thirsty “Living Vampire” – a being of immense strength, speed and heightened senses that needs to feed on the blood of humans every few hours to survive.
WHAT WE THOUGHT:
Despite my general love for all things Marvel, I went into the press screening of Morbius with the lowest of expectations. Jared Leto is a frequently terrible actor whose most recent turn in the House of Gucci, where he basically played a semi-tragic, real-life figure as Mario from Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers, was hilarious in its sheer awfulness. Morbius is not a proper Marvel Studios film but is part of the Sony deal that shares Spider-man himself with Marvel proper, but still has (semi?) exclusive rights to Spidey’s gallery of rogues and has been trying to set up its own self-contained shared universe with these same characters – first with the villains from the Amazing Spider-Man movies (nope) and then, again, with Venom.
And, seriously, Morbius?! A G-list Spider-man villain from the ’70s turned into a C-list Marvel anti-hero from the past few decades? That Morbius? Venom made sense, even if I’m not a fan, as he is a very popular character, but who the hell was demanding a Morbius: The Living Vampire (to give him his full name) film? I may be more of a DC guy in terms of the comics – which is why Morbius mostly strikes me as a knockoff of Batman villain, Man-Bat – but I’ve read more than my share of Marvel comics, and Morbius has barely featured in any of them.
And, yeah, the uniformly crap trailers didn’t exactly do anything to help the film’s case either.
The most shocking thing about Morbius, then, is that it is nowhere near as bad as I was expecting it to be. It almost couldn’t be. The second most shocking thing about Morbius, though, was that it left me wishing that it actually was that bad – at least then it would be worth discussing. At least then, it might have been something to laugh at or get angry with or elicit any sort of feeling, no matter how negative. Instead, it’s just a big bag of “meh” that I feel very little about at all.
Like Venom before it, Morbius is a real anachronism in superhero filmmaking. It’s been delayed by about a year by the pandemic, but it comes across like it was delayed at least fifteen, maybe twenty years – and not just for the usual reason of the pandemic making the past three years feel like three decades. It’s a 90’s/ early 2000s comic book movie that somehow found its way to being released in 2022, just a couple of months after Spider-Man: No Way Home not only reminded audiences of just how far superhero films have come over the past couple odd decades but of why Spider-Man remains such a strong slice of modern mythology that his latest film almost single-handedly saved cinemas.
Unlike Venom, though, whose first film had at least a few bright spots when Tom Hardy really got the chance to cut loose with the, as it turns out, rich comic potential of a man and his symbiote, and whose second film doubled down on the comedy to joyously mad effect, there’s nothing about Morbius to make it rise out of its morass of tedious dullness.
There are certainly a few things about the film that come across as properly bad – especially in the way that it makes less than zero sense and not in the fun way that actually helps make the superhero genre as imaginative, inventive and playful as it is – but even its these are lost in the sheer grey lifelessness of it all.
The action scenes are blandly incoherent, the plot twists are blandly predictable, and the whole film is blandly (and badly) in need of a working sense of humour and fun. The only person who looks like they’re having any fun at all is Matt Smith, and even then, not with much conviction. At the same time, the film’s only significant female character – Morbius’ assistant/ potential love interest, Dr Martine Bancroft – gets little to do other than being a damsel-in-distress and looking pretty while doing so (which, admittedly, the beautiful Adria Arjona has little trouble with).
However, nothing captures the film’s utter so-whatness better than Jared Leto. After overacting the hell out of the Joker and Paolo, “it’s a me, Mario!” Gucci, Leto’s sudden decision to play coy with a character known as the Living Vampire, is utterly bloody befuddling. He doesn’t overdo it at all here, but playing a classic Jekyll and Hyde character as a vacuum of charisma, personality, and emotional conflict, is hardly an improvement. I suppose there are worse actors out there, but I fail to think of any other major Hollywood actor who so consistently misjudges each and every performance as badly as Jared Leto. That he’s a pretentious “method actor” only makes his fall from grace after his significant comeback in Dallas Buyers Club all the more embarrassing, all the more annoying.
Still, even this would suggest something interesting about Morbius, and that’s to do it a service that the film absolutely does not deserve. We have, what, at least five more superhero and/ or comic book films (and even more TV series) due for release this year, just from Marvel and DC? I know Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness has been pushed back to May and that we’ll only be legally able to watch things like Moon Knight, Wandavision or Loki with the debut of Disney+ in South Africa (yay!) in May, but I doubt anyone is so hard up for superhero/ comic book content in the meantime that they would be remotely satisfied with something as hum-drum as Morbius. And if you are that hard up on capes and superpowers, might I suggest picking up some actual comic books instead? Or even a Marvel Unlimited subscription? You’ll be much better off, I can virtually promise.
Oh, and PS, yes, there are two mid-credit scenes, and though I suppose they’re worth it if you’re super interested in the non-MCU and/or why exactly Michael Keaton is so prominently featured in the trailer and on the film’s IMDB entry, they’re more likely to have you thinking “wait, what?” rather than “oh cool!”. And not in a way that sets up an intriguing mystery but in a way that, like so much of the film, just doesn’t work at all – and is made even worse when you read director Daniel Espinosa’s explanation for it on social media.
What. Freakin’. Ever.
WATCH THE TRAILER HERE:
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