Mor­bius

When I first got into film crit­i­cism, I accept­ed that every so often I would have to watch bad movies. This is fine for the most part – so the old adage goes, they can’t all be win­ners, and often there’s some per­verse plea­sure to be drawn from set­tling down in the dark to wit­ness some­thing that tran­scends taste and decen­cy to enter what I like to call ​‘fun bad’ territory.

At the very least watch­ing a tru­ly awful film can make me feel grate­ful for the embar­rass­ment of rich­es cin­e­ma can oth­er­wise offer us. But every so often, I sit down and watch a film so art­less, so lack­ing in craft or guile, I feel legit­i­mate­ly irri­tat­ed that ​“burn­ing the neg­a­tive” isn’t pos­si­ble since the advent of dig­i­tal recording.

Mor­bius, the Liv­ing Vam­pire, aka Dr Michael Mor­bius, PhD, MD, start­ed out life as a Spi­der-Man vil­lain, but even­tu­al­ly earned his own spin-off comics. Born with a rare blood dis­ease, he turns his preter­nat­ur­al intel­li­gence into a career as a world-renowned haema­tol­o­gist while attempt­ing to cure his own increas­ing­ly debil­i­tat­ing dis­or­der. When we meet him in this film, Mor­bius has just been award­ed the Nobel Prize – in the first of many baf­fling nar­ra­tive choic­es, the film cuts away from Michael’s accep­tance speech to a news­pa­per some days lat­er, telling us he reject­ed his Prize with a very fun­ny speech. Right then.

You see, Mor­bius doesn’t care about prizes. He’s fix­at­ed on find­ing a cure for the ill­ness which afflicts him and his pur­port­ed best friend Milo (whose name isn’t actu­al­ly Milo, it’s Lucien, but Mor­bius couldn’t be both­ered to learn it when they were in a Greek con­va­les­cence hos­pi­tal, so now every­one just calls him Milo). Milo, played by Matt Smith, is a rak­ish socialite who bankrolls Mor­bius while receiv­ing treat­ment from their doc­tor turned sur­ro­gate father, Nicholas (Jared Har­ris, who looks about as hap­py to be there as I was to see him mixed up in all this).

In an eth­i­cal­ly ques­tion­able move, Mor­bius decides to splice togeth­er bat and human DNA in order to cre­ate a cure for his blood dis­ease, and when the treat­ment appears to work on a lab mouse, he decides to use him­self as a human test sub­ject. This results in a hor­rif­ic trans­for­ma­tion aboard a car­go ship in inter­na­tion­al waters which leaves a pile of bod­ies behind and Mor­bius on the run.

Despite the char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of Mor­bius as a Liv­ing Vam­pire, his tax­on­o­my seems to more close­ly resem­ble Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Ini­tial­ly he has no con­trol over his ​‘vam­pire’ per­sona and goes into a state of fren­zy when hun­gry (though appar­ent­ly knows not to chow down on his love inter­est Dr Mar­ti­na Ban­croft, played by Adria Arjona) but seems to become more able to con­trol him­self over the course of the film. No rea­son is giv­en as to why.

In fact, for a genre so con­cerned with world-build­ing and lore, there’s pre­cious lit­tle at play in Mor­bius; we have no grasp of his pow­ers or weak­ness­es, beyond that he needs to drink arti­fi­cial blood every four hours and twen­ty min­utes, a point repeat­ed­ly brought up as if repeat­ing it makes it more com­pelling. The con­flict in the film comes when Milo decides he quite fan­cies the trade-off between cur­ing his painful ill­ness and becom­ing a crea­ture of the night. Mor­bius has to stop him, for rea­sons that are nev­er ful­ly explained.

While Smith cuts about like a cut-price Lestat, Leto is absolute­ly lost, seem­ing­ly con­found­ed by a role which doesn’t allow him to hide behind lay­ers of pros­thet­ics and put on a fun­ny lit­tle voice in place of act­ing. His line read­ings are stiff, his char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion rote, and we have no rea­son to care whether he suc­ceeds in stak­ing his broth­er or not. Even the cen­tral romance has all the pas­sion and spark of a wet week­end in Whitby.

All this to say: is this it? Is this what pass­es for a $75 mil­lion movie in 2022? Spe­cial effects and mon­ster design that would have bare­ly been pass­able in Buffy the Vam­pire Slay­er, a plot so thin­ly-sketched it’s hard­ly there at all, and uni­form­ly uncon­vinc­ing per­for­mances that make you won­der whether or not tak­ing part in this film was some sort of court-man­dat­ed com­mu­ni­ty service?

I’d like to say audi­ences deserve bet­ter, but maybe they don’t. Maybe the con­den­sa­tion of big-bud­get film­mak­ing into a few stu­dios and over-reliance on pre-exist­ing IP and fran­chis­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties was always going to lead us to this point, where a film so utter­ly devoid of charis­ma or per­son­al­i­ty can squeak into cin­e­mas with­out a sec­ond thought, all in ser­vice of build­ing some sort of naff vil­lain team up movie (if Mor­bius’ two half-heart­ed mid-cred­its scenes are any­thing to go by).

Still, I have to hope that soon­er or lat­er the bub­ble will burst, and a film as insult­ing to audi­ence appetites and intel­li­gence as this will be some sort of larg­er les­son for Hol­ly­wood. Prob­a­bly not though. There’s always anoth­er D‑tier com­ic book char­ac­ter wait­ing in the wings for their spin-off moment.

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