On a certain level, it makes sense that Sony would make a movie starring second string (at best) Spider-Man villain-turned-antihero Morbius, the Living Vampire. Like a lot of big studios, they want their own (profitable) cinematic universe, and they do have the film rights to the various Spider-Man characters. Naturally, they would go through those characters and see which ones might be able to hold their own in a feature film’s starring role. But Morbius? Really? He’s had a few solo series over at Marvel, but he’s not generally even seen all that much in the grand scheme of things. Granted, most of the other characters Sony has the rights to are bad guys, so having someone even moderately moral makes sense as a hero, but Morbius?
Well, we now live in a world where Morbius has his own movie, and if Jared Leto was going to play a superhero, this one does makes the most sense for him as an actor.
Dr. Michael Morbius (Leto) is a brilliant scientist searching for a cure for the blood-borne illness he has had his entire life, requiring three transfusions a day just to stay alive. He’s developed artificial blood, but that’s not enough. A cure might be found in enzymes found in vampire bats, and Dr. Morbius, against the advice of his colleague Dr. Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), is working on splicing bat genes with his own to find the cure that he, to say nothing of his childhood friend and financier Milo (Matt Smith), desperately needs. His experiments are showing promise, but the final steps may be a bit on the illegal side to pull off.
Naturally, he does it anyway, and the net result is while he does have periods where the illness is in full remission, these periods are temporary without the ingestion of some kind of blood, be it human or his own artificial, though the artificial seems to be losing potency over time. However, Milo doesn’t seem to care about the fact that this hunger may be making the good doctor into a monster of some kind. And since exsanguinated bodies keep popping up, Morbius soon finds himself the top suspect in a number of otherwise unexplained deaths. Is Dr. Morbius really the monster responsible, or is there someone else behind it all?
Let’s cut to the chase: Morbius is not a good movie. Granted, there are in my mind two types of bad movies. One is the utter trainwreck of a film. Think something like Cats or a good chunk of M. Night Shyamalan’s filmography. These are movies where nothing seems to be going right and the best an audience might hope for is something that is unintentionally hilarious. The other type is something that’s rather dull and boring, something where there isn’t necessarily anything all that awful about the movie, but there’s nothing really good about it either, a movie that is at best aggressively nothing special. Morbius is the second type. There’s nothing really wrong about it. But there’s nothing really right about it either. Things happen without much explanation, but nothing really jarring unless you stop to think about it. Leto, known for being a bit of an oddball both on- and off-screen, actually gives a decent, restrained performance. There’s even a decently suspenseful scene set in a hallway with lights set on motion detectors. But there isn’t a lot to recommend here. The humor doesn’t work, the horror is too tame, and the movie doesn’t really have any particularly original plot points on display.
That said, Matt Smith seems to be having a ball playing Milo. He steals pretty much every scene he appears in, moreso as the movie goes on, and he seems to be hitting the exact right note that a movie like this should have even if the rest of the film doesn’t quite fit the same tone. If the rest of the movie had matched what he was doing, it probably would have been the right sort of gonzo fun that a PG-13 movie about a superhero pseudo-vampire should be. Instead, well, it was just kinda there with one actor giving a fun performance to distract from the overall there-ness the movie had. And quite frankly, as much as Smith did well with his character, I don’t think that’s enough of a reason to go out and see the movie right away. Wait for streaming if you really want to see it.
Grade: C-
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