Morbius (2022 | USA | 104 minutes | Daniel Espinosa)
Did anyone really ask for this?
Jared Leto is Dr. Michael Morbius, a man born with a rare condition that makes walking difficult. He devotes his life to medicine and trying to find a cure for his condition. It earns him a Nobel Prize that he rejects for reasons the movie declines to give (though I have some ideas). He looks far more like the singer of 30 Seconds to Mars than a Nobel Laureate. As a child under constant medical care, he meets his new best friend Lucien (or Loxias, I’ve seen conflicting accounts) Crown, who he calls Milo at first meeting and then Lucien/Loxias continues to be called Milo in every interaction for the rest of his life, or the length of the film, whichever mercifully comes first.
As he gets older, though, Dr. Morbius’s medical research becomes more, let’s just say, experimental. He begins trying to infuse vampire bat DNA with human DNA and the results are disastrous. The procedure temporarily turns him into a murderous bat/vampire. That unequivocally makes Morbius the second best new superhero/comic book movie I watched in the month of March about an Area Man who turns into a bat.
Things go from bad to worse when Milo/Loxias/Lucien (Matt Smith) takes the same concoction and has the same effects as Dr. Morbius, but he’s more malevolent and enjoys the chaos and violence he brings everywhere. Dr. Morbius spends his time trying to find a way to reverse the effects of what he’s taken with the help of Dr. Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), a potential love interest and the best part of the movie, and avoiding two useless FBI agents (Al Madrigal and Tyrese Gibson).
The movie is set up to be the origin story of the Spider-Man villain but the whole movie felt like a huge waste, making the movie at least MCU-adjacent. The special effects will look dated in about two years and the plot doesn’t even really attempt to make sense, but those things would be easy enough to overlook if Jared Leto gave any appearance that he wanted to be in this film or if Matt Smith’s villain became something other than Joker-lite with weird superpowers.
Morbius is such a frustrating movie because it felt obligatory, or maybe the loss of a bet. I must confess that I signed up for this press screening knowing that it could possibly make me about five minutes late to work. I decided early on that I didn’t feel like leaving that up to chance and ducked out a few minutes before the credits ran. Yes, that means this movie was so unpleasant I would’ve rather been at work.
Morbius opens in theaters on Friday, April 1.