MORBIUS (2022) **

After suffering from a rare blood disease all his life, Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) performs an illicit experiment mixing human DNA with that of vampire bats.  Naturally, he tries the serum on himself and although at first it seems to be the cure he’s looking for, it has one nasty side effect:  It turns him into a CGI-faced vampire with a thirst for human blood.  

I like these comic book movies probably more than I should, but even for a dyed in the wool comic book fan like me, Morbius was pretty bad.  It seems to be a throwback to the cheap comic book flicks from the early ‘00s.  Even viewed through those rose-tinted glasses, it still comes up short.  If you enjoyed Elektra, Blade:  Trinity, and Ghost Rider:  Spirit of Vengeance, you’ll probably barely tolerate Morbius.  

It’s one thing for a comic book movie to be inspired by the ‘90s/’00s, but it still kind of has to do its own thing.  Look at The Batman, which came out just last month.  It was clearly ripping off the David Fincher thrillers of the ‘90s and ‘00s, but it had its own fresh spin.  Morbius on the other hand looks like a lost comic book film from the ‘00s that you might drunkenly catch at two in the morning on TBS.  There are bullet-time shootouts that look like they came out of a Matrix-inspired ‘90s action movie, a gratuitous villain dance montage that looks inspired by Spider-Man 3, a sequence where Morbius uses some sort of sonar superpower that’s right out of Daredevil, and even a moment that lifts directly from The Usual Suspects, but it’s like a hundred times less effective.  (Then again, there is a scene where he controls hundreds of bats, which makes him more of a Batman than The Batman, so there’s that.)

It doesn’t help that the superhero action sequences are lackluster.  The scenes of Morbius and the villain bouncing off buildings and punching each other in mid-air get old fast, and the finale is so woefully anticlimactic, you’re left wondering, “Is that it?” even well past the customary post-credits sequences (which are just hollow imitations of post-credits sequences we’ve seen in other Marvel movies).  The whole movie is like that though.  It rushes headlong into the next scene before it’s even properly developed an idea.  In fact, there’s a subplot where Morbius is treating a little girl who has the same blood disease as he does, and he is forced to put her into an induced coma to save her life.  However, we never find out what happened to her.  There’s no scene later on where he brings her out of it.  Heck, he doesn’t even mention her again.  It’s just another subplot that gets lost in the shuffle of the generic superhero action.  

It’s a shame too because Leto is committed enough to the overall Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde vibe of the character.  The best scene comes when he takes over a low-rent counterfeiting operation and turns it into his own underground science lab.  The part where he confronts the ringleader is entertaining, and if the movie had him fighting more street-level crime, it could’ve been fun.  As it stands, Morbius is one of the weakest post-MCU comic book flicks in recent memory.