Morbius movie review: Jared Leto's 'Living Vampire' is a confused, muddled mess

Language: English

Somehow, they managed to make a vampire superhero film starring Jared Leto (who looks sounds and behaves in real life like he’s living this exact type of movie 24/7) deathly boring. It’s impressive, when you think about it — and thinking about it will already require more mental effort than Sony has collectively expended on Morbius, it seems. On paper, this ought to have been a slam dunk. Thanks to the popularity of Spider Man: No Way Home , interest in the Spider-Verse has never been higher. The trailers for Morbius certainly exploited the Spider-Man connection (the central character is a recurring villain for Spider-Man in the comic), with little references to the Tobey Maguire and Tom Holland Spidey movies (curiously, I don’t recall seeing any of them in the film itself; editing floor mishap or cynical and misleading salesmanship? You decide).

Unfortunately, Morbius is crippled by a protagonist who’s not that interesting, a villain who’s introduced far too late, a screenplay that’s insecure about its un-ironic tonality and a shrill soundtrack that’s high on ill-timed bombast.

Most parts in this machine don’t work and the whole thing sputters along with all the grace of a rusty wheelbarrow.

Dr Michael Morbius (Leto), ‘the living vampire’ has been slowly dying of a rare blood disease all his life — so naturally, the cure is for him to go hunting for vampire bats in South America, something which every reasonable doctor/patient does, of course. “The bats, they welcome me like a brother,” Morbius says at a later point in the film, once his abilities (super-strength, sonar hearing et al) kick in. If you think that’s the most twee line you’re going to hear, you are sadly mistaken.

The people around him mostly get short shrift throughout the film, whether it’s his girlfriend and fellow scientist Martine (Adria Arjona, impressive despite a one-note character), his sort-of mentor Dr Emil (Jared Harris, utterly wasted) or later, Simon Stroud, the FBI agent tasked with bringing him down (Tyrese Gibson, in on the joke). These are not characters so much as afterthoughts and feel like they were created by working backwards from Morbius’ expected character trajectory.

Typically, in a thinly written superhero film, the visual effects step into paper the gaps. But with Morbius, the action sequences might be the weakest link yet. The first few times we see Morbius post-transformation, we don’t really have a clear idea of what abilities he has. Hell, we don’t even know if the transformation is weighing on his mind, whether he feels the moral consequences of his actions. No, once the bloodshed is done he goes right back to being… well, a dopey guy who looks a lot like Jared Leto and folds paper napkins for the benefit of strangers’ children.

In the animated Spidey show, at least they had a clear idea of who Morbius was—he was a Shakespearean kind of old-timey villain with a carrot of redemption perpetually dangling before him (think Disney’s The Beast). He is prone to brooding moments on the balcony of his Gothic-looking house. His romance with Felicia Hardy also presented a clear connection with the Spider-Verse and an additional bone of contention with Peter Parker himself. I feel like this already would have made for a much more interesting live-action story than the muddled, confused mess that is Morbius.

What of Matt Smith, then? Morbius takes his supremely gifted actor (he’s not my favourite Doctor Who, but his performance remains phenomenal) and gives him not much to work with. His villainous Milo has the same disease as Morbius and ends up gaining the same set of nebulous abilities. But beyond that, it’s not very clear why two sick little boys found each other as grown-ups and why their paths conflicted. In the second half, they just… start fighting, basically. Things and people fall from great heights. Black and blue nights, the cinematographic staple of this film, start getting gloomier and gloomier as the film progresses, as though they were acknowledging the futility of Morbius.

It’s all deeply ironic, really, because the character of Michael Morbius came about as a direct result of comicbook writers beginning to have fun, in the early 1970s. You see, America’s infamous, moralising ‘Comics Code’, which forbade supernatural creatures, among other things, had just been lifted and writers were tasting unadulterated freedom after a long time. Hence the over-the-top wackiness and horror-movie beats of “Dr Michael Morbius, the Living Vampire!”.

Morbius, however is the opposite of letting one’s hair down (another subject which Jared Leto should excel at — on paper). Jared Leto now has the single worst Marvel Comics movie to go with the single most insufferable DC Comics movie (David Ayer’s Suicide Squad), verily a two-fer for the ages.

Rating: 1/5 stars

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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