Dog’s Movie House: “Morbius” Fitfully Entertaining, Flawed Marvel Film With Potential!

“Morbius” tells the tale of Leto’s Michael Morbius, a brilliant doctor who is suffering from an incurable blood disease that has left him crippled and dying. In a desperate effort to cure himself, Morbius combines the genes of a vampire bat with those of a human to create an experimental serum. The serum works but has the predictably awful side effect of turning him into a creature of the night. Along with his scientist/girlfriend Martine Bancroft (a talented but underused Adria Arjona), Morbius now has to find a cure for himself before he loses total control and starts killing his fellow humans (to this point, Morbius has survived on synthetic blood he invented). Also complicating things is the fact that his childhood friend Milo (played as an adult by Matt Smith) who also suffers from the same condition as Morbius, has ingested the serum and become a vampire like Morbius, albeit one with our hero’s conscience. A showdown is inevitable.

Despite an interesting premise, “Morbius” suffers from some head-scratching story decisions. There is a scene where he captures a bunch of vampire bats and puts them in this large cylinder in his lab. (Despite only needing a few bats upon which to conduct of his research). They are constantly flying around in ominous patterns yet never seem to feed or sleep (which is what bats mostly do, in my experience). The character development is fairly shallow as well despite some good performances from Leto and Smith. Everything suffers from a somewhat rushed pace. It was as though director Daniel Espinosa and writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless were in such a hurry to get to the vampire action that they hurried through the story development without thinking about the consequences.

Admittedly the vampire action is pretty good, with the special effects (particularly Morbius’ CGI makeup) being fairly convincing. Some of the attacks (especially early in the film) carry a nice horror vibe to them, and some of Espinosa’s camera work is quite good, although he sometimes has a tendency to get a little crazy with the motion of the camera during certain chase scenes, particularly in the finale.

The acting is pretty good all around, with Leto and Smith being the standouts. Though their friendship is underdeveloped, the two have a couple of really good scenes together that make up for the lack of scripted narrative. Jared Harris also has some good moments as the mentor of both Milo and Morbius, and Arjona is good enough that I’d like to see Bancroft again as a fully developed character. Al Madrigal and Tyrese Gibson, however, are wasted as the FBI agents on Morbius’ tail.

Still, “Morbius” provides a good matinee’s worth of unusual superhero action with a horror twist, even if the origin story feels a tad familiar. There are also ties to Venom and The Vulture (watch for Michael Keaton in the post credit scenes) and more than one possible link to Spider-Man. It’s all connected which ensures that Morbius will be onscreen again at some point in the future. I only wish his first appearance had been more fulfilling. 3 Out Of 5 On Kendog’s Barkometer! So Sayeth The Kendog!

Pages: 1 2