Return to the Trashy Comic-Book Movie

T hrowback time! Morbius dials back the clock on comic-book movies to a generation ago, when the genre was not yet the absolute center of popular culture but more like Hollywood’s back room, where possibly profitable but defiantly skeezy things took place. Movies about superpowers were dim, derivative efforts directed not by Oscar aspirants but by gleeful hacks whose main concern was to stuff the thing with lots of dumb special effects to give its intended audience a break from worrying about their SAT scores. As in predecessors such as Blade and Underworld, Morbius bets that you really can’t go wrong with the target audience of half-bright teens when you’ve got super-strong vampires hurling each other around the scenery and making bloodthirsty noises through their fangy teeth.

As played by the generally insufferable Jared Leto, who again emerges as  eminently slappable, Michael Morbius is a crippled super-scientist lamed by a DNA defect that will consign him to an early grave. So he makes a last-ditch effort to save himself by grafting a bit of bat DNA into his own. Post-treatment, he becomes a bat-like vigilante who wreaks havoc in the night. So: batfellow? Batperson? No, he boringly sticks with the name Morbius. Did I mention the DNA in question is from a vampire bat? Even if your level of scientific and medical training is minimal, you can probably guess what the problematic side effect of turning yourself into vampirebatman might be. Michael Morbius, super-genius, does not figure this out. Until it’s too late.

Morbius, whose face and eyes flit back and forth from horrifying Batguy to innocent Jared Leto depending solely on whether director Daniel Espinosa feels things might be getting a bit visually dull, discovers he can survive temporarily by drinking “artificial blood,” which he invented, and which gives him full-spectrum superpowers including super-hearing, super-strength, and flying. Wait, flying? Vampire bats can fly because they have wings, which Morbius does not have. Why would vampire-bat DNA give a man invisible rocket boosters to allow him to blast off sensationally from the tops of tall buildings, soaring over Manhattan? And why does Morbius keep kicking up a little CGI dust cloud that recalls Pigpen’s unfortunate dirt corona in the Charlie Brown comics? Could this just be a case of the FX guys trying to save a few bucks by not quite finishing the job? One does get the sense that not a lot of studio confidence sits behind this film, which has been sitting on the shelf for nearly two years and seems vaguely to embarrass Sony. (Stick around for the first few minutes of the credits, though: There are two mid-credits sequences that provide a moronically dumb way of tying the film back to a storyline you’re probably familiar with, via an Oscar-nominated performer).

Morbius realizes that within a few days, he’s going to be able to function only on human blood. Not unreasonably, he tells his assistant (Adria Arjona), an exceptionally dull character the screenwriters didn’t bother to think about for more than 30 seconds, that he’s in hell and will have to kill himself lest he continue to live as a murderous monster. It shouldn’t be that hard for him to kill himself, but instead of doing so, he just talks about it. Meanwhile, a crisis beckons: There’s another vampirebatman on the loose. Wouldn’t you know it, it’s Morbius’s best friend!

Back when the two of them were sickly boys together, Morbius and “Milo,” as Morbius calls him, forged an indelible bond because they had the same DNA defect that doomed them to living as cripples. But, as a grownup, Milo (played by Matt Smith, who was great as Prince Philip in The Crown) is impressed by Morbius’s transformation and thinks: Why live a brief and painful life in the grip of disease when you can be an awesome flying vampire? The movie is basically Lean In for the undead. Sure, this requires a bit of a heel turn — you have to spend your nights sucking out people’s blood — but let’s put a positive spin on this. For instance: Ever met an arrogant Wall Street tool in a bar? Don’t those guys deserve a little painful exsanguination? Bleed the rich! If the movie possessed a soupçon of wit, it would have shown Milo becoming a folk hero with the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crowd.

Alas, the total quantity of wit in this movie is to a soupçon what Jared Leto is to Daniel Day-Lewis. Screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless’s idea of a funny quirk is that Morbius calls all of his pals “Milo” (Milo’s name is really Lucien), and the way they throw together borrowed elements is shameless. (In an Incredible Hulk moment, Morbius says, “I’m starting to get hungry. You don’t want to see me when I’m hungry.”) The intended effect of dank terror is undercut by the general lackadaisical aura hanging over everything. Really, if there were a killer vampire on the loose and slaughtering randomly chosen people in New York City, you’d expect the newsreader who passes along this info to sound a bit more excited than the one in this movie, who sounds as though she’s reporting a traffic tie-up on the BQE. But then again, the characters themselves can’t seem to decide whether they’re supposed to be scary or silly: “For the record, I wasn’t going to go full Dracula on you.” Thanks, bro.