Morbius Review

Morbius, the Jared Leto-led superhero film about a so-called "Living Vampire," marks Sony's Spider-Man Universe's first foray outside of Venom area. Director Daniel Espinosa addresses the origins of a bat-man with horror flourishes similar to those found in his sci-fi film Life, but they're never pronounced enough to satisfy horror fans. Morbius' origin story follows the most formulaic structure, with an overly serious Leto doing the polar opposite of Tom Hardy's beloved Venom schtick. It's a decision that emphasizes Morbius' moral quandary as a self-aware vampire over anything deemed "superhero cinema fun," pushing everything deathly serious to its logical conclusion.

Dr. Michael Morbius is introduced as a Nobel Laureate with a terrible blood illness that he has pledged to cure. His claim to fame, and Horizon's breakthrough, is an artificial blood that has saved many lives — the seafoam-colored liquid is one of the film's sporadic splashes of color in the midst of the putrid blackness. Since their early private health care treatments, Morbius has worked alongside scientist and future romantic interest Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona) in the name of his ailing best buddy Milo (Matt Smith). Morbius splices vampire bat DNA with a human subject — himself — resulting in his ghastly transformation into a not-yet-proven-controllable murdering machine, and it's the acme of catastrophic consequences brought on by fraternal love.

How the origin beats cycle through the repetitious motions is one of Morbius' early challenges. There's no attempt to creatively dump exposition that could have been read as an introductory text scroll, and there's a lack of energy behind Dr. Morbius' condition because we know he'll eventually go all man-bat. Despite establishing such a horror-forward figure, writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless struggle to distinguish Morbius' emergence from that of countless other superheroes and supervillains. Morbius goes through the motions in terms of grander cinematic universes and hopeful sequels, only to end just as our curiosity peaks. It's always a first-step film that exists because it needs to exist for subsequent reasons, which become clear as the script progresses.

It's strange to see Morbius so soon after Greig Fraser's magnificent cinematography in The Batman, because the latter becomes yet another hazy post-production ugly. Nothing makes sense when Leto's sculpted cheekbones transform into Dr. Morbius' angular, skeleton frown, which is chased by a spectral mist of sound waves whether he's lunging, sprinting, or soaring. Morbius is a bleak, black-on-black-on-black tapestry with so many segments that it loses aesthetic interest monochromatically. Morbius soars past New York City skyscrapers like Spider-Man for the first time, yet there's nothing exceptional about the aerial view. There are no major gothic gestures in the cinematography, only the occasional F. W. Murnau reference or Freddy Krueger cue.

Except for Matt Smith's portrayal of Milo, Morbius feels like it came straight from a Superhero Movie factory. He appears to have just walked off the set of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, providing his dapper underworld explorer with the much-needed color the film requires. Leto's drearily dour genius is the antithesis of Smith's flamboyance and vitality, which is a deliberate but ineffective comparison. Despite the fact that the film's title is Dr. Morbius, Smith regularly steals scenes as the two meet paths. Smith is so brilliant at being horrible that it's almost tolerable.

Verdict

Morbius is unremarkable in a number of ways, squandering the promise of what should have been an exciting blend of ominous horror and superhero thrills. For a proper scare, one scene echoes David F. Sandberg's Lights Out, but otherwise horror references are limited to trite Dracula jokes. That is, in fact, the film's entire approach. Because the task at hand is to get to the end credits, where the meat is, everything appears extraneous and uninterested in intelligent storytelling. Morbius is so focused on establishing Sony's Spider-Man Universe and promising sequels — which could very well be better now that the groundwork is in place — that it forgets to engage its audience enthusiastically from the outset.