Jared Leto as Dr. Michael Morbius in Daniel Espinoza’s Morbius Photo: Sony Pictures
Nobody wants to see a crappy movie, but a total disaster can often be more interesting than something that’s only mediocre. Morbius falls into the latter category, a run-of-the-mill origin story that’s skillfully acted and professionally edited, but mostly lifeless on screen – and feeling rather disappointing after two years of anticipation of its release. Jared Leto delivers an appropriately chilling and contradictory take on the eponymous scientist versus a backdrop-chewing Matt Smith as his surrogate brother and occasional adversary, while director Daniel Espinoza (Life) directs the action as if his latest project were cosplaying as a series of classic horror films . The result is a boring, competent, and safe superhero adventure destined to be forgotten before the credits roll.
Leto (House of Gucci) plays Dr. Michael Morbius, a scientist who dedicated his life and career to curing rare blood disorders after contracting one as a child. Funded by his surrogate brother Lucien (Smith), a wealthy orphan who was alternately raised and supervised by their mutual doctor, Nicholas (Jared Harris), Morbius takes increasingly risky and ethical chances to ease the fatigue and physical disability afflicting the they both suffer. After harvesting the organs of vampire bats in search of a crucial anticoagulant, Morbius administers himself an experimental treatment that will restore his health and strength – but not before succumbing to an inexplicable bloodlust and murdering the mercenary team that runs his laboratory in international waters.
C
disease
to water
Jared Leto, Matt Smith, Adria Arjona, Jared Harris, Al Madrigal, Tyrese Gibson
Availability
In theaters April 1st
When his lab partner Dr. Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona) is injured during the outing, Morbius calls the authorities on her behalf and flees the scene before being arrested. But while he’s trying to figure out what to do about his newfound condition, Lucien contacts Morbius and demands his own dosage of the treatment. When two detectives track Morbius in search of answers about his role in a horrific death spree, he tries to find a cure for his voracious appetite. Morbius soon finds himself at odds not only with the cops but also with Lucien after his former friend agrees to become a bloodthirsty, superhuman monster. This makes Morbius more determined than ever to find a cure for the violent and all-consuming ailment afflicting both he and Lucien, while acknowledging that it could cost them both their lives.
From a screenplay by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, whose credit was Luke Evan’s 2014 vampire film Dracula Untold, Espinoza shuffles through a series of well-known bloodsucker clichés that are often joked about but otherwise address the symptoms of a superhero curse, à la Hulk. It’s hard to remember the last movie that treated these fictional creatures with any real dignity. This one is only too happy to exploit their violent and dangerous impulses for set pieces, and then subverts the more interesting elements of addiction or biological need to let Morbius, Lucien and his co-stars babble on in increasingly tiresome explanatory exchanges. When it’s not perched on the shoulders of genre giants to invoke spooky moments, Morbius essentially wants to be the Batman Begins of Sony’s supervillain franchise, and it’s not afraid to borrow generously from its predecessors to convey the same atmosphere or produce the same tone.
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Morbius’ first attack on the Mercenaries, for example, unfolds as if he were the Xenomorph in a better-lit, earthbound version of the Nostromo and/or LV-426, decimating the space truckers and auto-weapon marines with rapid brutality. A later fight between Morbius and Lucien, meanwhile, evokes the tube car chase from An American Werewolf In London, but with less style and more computer-generated imagery. It’s believed that there are only a limited number of locations filmmakers can use for action scenes that haven’t yet been shot in an iconic way, but it takes little imagination to make those cinematic connections as they happen. What’s more, Jon Ekstrand’s score works in exactly the same nondescript way that so much film and television music seems to work these days. The few moments that stand out do so because they sound so similar to Hans Zimmer’s wall-of-sound work on Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, especially when accompanying a scene where, say, a man looks up at the sky as a swarm of bats flutter obediently around him.
While close-up shots of Jared Leto’s vibrating ears feel unnecessary, the effect of Morbius’ “radar” as he scans his surroundings – from his elegantly furnished laboratory to the whole of Manhattan – actually offers a decent picture as the buildings stretch out below Waves dissipate fog. But the endlessly changing faces and colored trails that trace these monsters’ progress through a cityscape are rapidly repetitive, and by the time Morbius and Lucien are pounding each other from one pile of rubble to the next, the action becomes an empty placeholder for the hero’s resolve Espinoza telegraph. His instinct to attempt something semi-tragic, even operatic, is admirable and occasionally works when he slows things down to create a single, tableau-like moment, but the rest of the time the film ebbs and flows without excitement between dope character motivations and heaps Jargon about blood.
Luckily, when he’s not fueling it quite as much as Tom Hardy did in the Venom franchise, Leto doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously to keep a bit of fun from creeping into the film. But his character’s journey is too obvious, predictable, and strangely impatient to come to its conclusion for audiences to care much whether or not he becomes a superhero or succumbs to his illness. Especially since Morbius has no particular inclination to help ordinary people without Lucien’s vast financial resources, it’s hard to imagine him doing anything for anyone after gaining his powers and seemingly learning to control them. Smith, on the other hand, seems to be enjoying his chance to gain a foothold opposite Leto, but he also seems aware that however viewers take his portrayal as the film’s blood-sucking super-villain, his face will mostly be covered with wildly uneven computer-generated effects .
Without spoiling anything, a few post-credits sequences created a future for Leto’s character in a larger world, which you can understand why Sony would try to telegraph, but given the failures of previous Spider-Man spin-offs ( especially those from The Amazing). movies) it’s hard to believe they’ve really thought through any of these next steps. But until then, Morbius feels like exactly the kind of second-story superhero adventure that audiences will accept in between that they actively want. Admittedly, it’s odd to want to think of a film like this worse, but that would mean it failed as much as the swings it took; In comparison, Morbius is a walk in the park, or at best a Bunt. That might qualify him as a hit for Leto, Espinoza and Sony, but that doesn’t mean it’s a lot of fun to watch from the stands.