Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Daniel Espinosa
Starring: Jared Leto, Matt Smith, Adria Arjona, Jared Harris, Al Madrigal, Tyrese Gibson
Much like Liberal Arts students, vampires are known for sleeping all
day. Morbius gives the viewer an insight into life as a
vampire, by which I mean I came very close to nodding off during my
afternoon screening. 50 years ago vampire movies gave us lesbians who
looked like Ingrid Pitt sinking their teeth into the throats of baron's
daughters and upsetting conservative mores. Now we get
Jared Leto moping around in a hoody as Hollywood attempts to
drain every last drop of plasma out of Marvel's roster of
characters.
In the comics, Morbius first appeared as one of Spider-Man's foes, but
in the post-Anne Rice '90s he became a troubled anti-hero. In other
words, he stopped being fun. He doesn't have much fun in director
Daniel Espinosa's film either. This Morbius is very much a
throwback to all those brooding vampire movies of the '90s –
The Addiction, The Prophecy et al – but with an aesthetic heavily
borrowed from Ted Nicolau's Subspecies series, sans the
work of some talented Romanian cinematographers.
In a prologue we see young Michael Morbius and young Milo become
friends as they're stuck in a clinic with a rare affliction that leaves
them partially paralysed. Michael is a scientific whiz, and is taken
away to a special school in New York, growing up to become a Nobel
winning scientist who improbably looks like Jared Leto with a bad fever.
Milo grows up to be Matt Smith.
During experiments held in international waters aboard a cargo ship
named the Murnau (that's as far as this movie comes to evoking German
Expressionism), Morbius only goes and turns himself into a vampire after
fiddling around with bats. Every few hours he needs to drink artificial
blood to stop himself from turning into a bloodsucker and going after
the real stuff, and so he sets about sciencing a solution while evading
the authorities (which amounts to walking around in a hoody, a famous
way of not attracting the attention of the police).
Meanwhile his old mate Milo turns himself into a vampire too, leading
the pair on a collision course. The big difference between the pair is
that Milo enjoys being a vampire, prancing around in his powerful new
body like Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor and hitting
on other blokes' girlfriends.
These movies always have a female scientist love interest. Here she's
played by Adria Arjona, who gets about as much to do as any of
her 1950s predecessors. Such characters are always telling the stubborn
hero not to mess around with bats, but they never listen. Didn't they
learn anything from the Covid pandemic?
Even those of us who are bored to tears by the never-ending superhero
cavalcade can notice a distinct difference in work ethic between the
Disney and Sony offerings. When Sony don’t have Mickey and Donald
looking over their shoulder, as in the Tom Holland Spider-Man films, the
resulting movies have a distinct whiff of "fuck it, it's five o'clock,
it'll do" about them. Both the Venom movies felt like nobody bothered
advancing beyond a first draft, and that's the same feeling we get here.
Everything about Morbius is half-assed, from the thinly sketched
characters (I honestly couldn't figure out why we were supposed to view
Milo as more villainous than Morbius) to CG sequences that resemble
Playstation 2 era cut-scenes. Even Leto, who famously immerses himself
in roles in a manner that would make Hoffman and De Niro feel lazy,
doesn't seem all that bothered here.
Morbius links into the Sony slice of the MCU, the one that houses
Spider-Man, which means we get the obligatory hint at things to come
courtesy of an end credits cameo by an actor that the movie could have
really used throughout to liven things up. Maybe Spidey and Morbius are
set for a smackdown in the near future. When that bout occurs, I'll have
to watch it for professional reasons. What will your excuse be?
