Morbius (2022)

Morbius (2022)

 

3/10

 Starring

Jared Leto

Matt Smith

Adria Arjona

 

Directed by Daniel Espinosa

Morbius is a totally lazy movie script brought to life. No matter how it looks, this is not the dark horror tale you might have expected. The movie is so lazily put together, with a script that lacks any form of creativity. It runs its own race in drafting an origin story for Michael Morbius, playing freely with the powers of the Living Vampire. However, this freedom is abused by bad directing, a lack of character depth, and poor editing.

The film creates its own villain, with plenty of space to build a compelling story, but instead, it makes a mess of everything. I think Jared Leto’s portrayal of Morbius was overly intense for such a weak script, though the colorful performance by Matt Smith as Milo helped a lot. Beyond that, I feel this was a bad job, done badly.

The bat effects in the final fight against Milo were anticlimactic. The movie plot starts in a way we’re somewhat familiar with regarding Morbius: a Nobel Prize-winning biologist with a rare blood condition. In this Sony version, Morbius has an adopted brother named Milo, with whom he shares the same blood condition. They met as children in a hospital wing. While Morbius grew up alone, Milo came from a wealthy background and, as adults, Milo became Morbius’ benefactor, funding his experiments to find a cure for their illness.

Morbius eventually found a potential cure: a fusion of vampire bat DNA with human DNA. He tested it on himself, and, as you might expect from the comics, things didn’t go as planned. Morbius woke up hungry and killed everyone in his lab, draining them of blood, except for his lover, Bancroft, who was knocked out during the chaos.

When Milo learned what had happened, he asked Morbius to inject him too, but Morbius refused. Milo then broke into Morbius’ lab, using a nurse to help himself get injected with the spliced DNA. Like Morbius, Milo became a living vampire, but unlike Morbius—who struggles to control his urges—Milo embraced the chaos, causing havoc everywhere. Now, Morbius takes it upon himself to stop Milo.

For me, the movie tries to ride the success of Sony’s best Marvel attempt so far, Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). That film seems to have given Sony some ideas: they use the liberty caused by Doctor Strange’s spell to transport characters from the MCU into Sony’s universe. However, this is limited to characters they have the rights to, which they hinted at in the end by transporting one of Spider-Man’s villains from the MCU into Sony’s Spider-Verse.

I regret seeing this movie and hope nobody else has to go through the same struggle.