Morbius

Jared Leto plays a terminally-ill scientist who accidentally turns himself into a vampire in this shockingly inept superhero saga.

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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Published 31 Mar 2022

Tags: Adria Arjona Daniel Espinosa Jared Harris Jared Leto Matt Smith Morbius