Throwback 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.
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