Morbius: Film Review
*MILD SPOILERS*
Sony’s latest Marvel movie, Morbius, has been delayed so many times that I genuinely thought it might never come out – and that would have probably been for the best!
This film stars Jared Leto as Dr. Michael Morbius, a gifted scientist who has been working on a cure for the blood disorder that has impacted his life since he was a child. He decides to splice bat DNA with human, and while the serum gives him superhuman powers, it also makes him a vampire who needs to drink blood regularly to survive.
The biggest issue with Morbius is that it’s so painstakingly obvious that it exists just to set up a sequel. That’s par for the course these days – everyone is trying to create their own universe – but this is just so apparent. The film is unengaging, dull, and just going through the motions. It’s like Sony has done the absolute minimum with it because they want to get to the likely Sinister Six movie. But nobody is gonna care about your team-up film if the origin stories are rubbish.
It feels reminiscent of the superhero films we got back in the ’90s/’00s before Marvel showed us how good they could be and set the standard we’ve come to expect. Morbius isn’t that much worse than Venom tbh but at least that film makes up for its shortcomings by being funny and entertaining. With Morbius, it’s not even a case of “so bad it’s good”, it’s so bland, generic and serious that it didn’t make me feel anything. It’s simply OK.
And what strikes me as odd is that Morbius is positioned as this supervillain but he actually turns out to be the good guy or at least the lesser of two evils. His best friend Milo (Matt Smith) suffers from the same disease and takes the serum, but he wants to drink the blood from people rather than from the artificial blood bags like Morbius. Smith fully hams it up as the classic British villain and gives a larger than life performance. You should want to see them fight each other but you don’t because the CGI in the action scenes is so ugly and messy. Their vampiric faces look so fake at times!
I didn’t think Leto did a bad job. He looks the part with his long black hair and he’s watchable as Michael, not the vampire. While I didn’t particularly root for anyone, I liked Adria Arjona as his fellow doctor Martine Bancroft. They all do the best with the script they’re given and it’s not their fault it’s so uninspired.
Morbius trots out the same tired origin story formula and offers us nothing we haven’t seen before. And then it just stops! It doesn’t even have a conclusive ending, it just leads into the teases for the next thing and they’re not even especially exciting!
In cinemas from Thursday 31st March