105 min | PG-13 | April 1, 2022 | Columbia Pictures
A brilliant scientist with a fatal blood disease cures himself by splicing in bat DNA. The cure turns him into a vampire with a thirst he cannot control. The film has even less control than he does.
Dr. Michael Morbius is a Nobel-caliber scientist dying of a rare blood disorder. He engineers a therapy from vampire bats and injects himself. The cure works and then it does not. He gains strength and speed and a hunger for human blood that he tries to manage with synthetic substitutes. The film wants to be a tragedy about a brilliant man who becomes a monster. It never builds the character underneath the premise, so the monster has nothing to mourn.
Jared Leto plays Morbius as a hushed and sullen presence. He delivers every line at the same low register whether he is curing children or draining mercenaries. The performance has no arc because the script gives him no interior life to track. Matt Smith plays Milo, Morbius’s lifelong friend who takes the same cure and embraces the appetite. Smith treats the role as a chance to dance and preen and chew the production design, and his glee exposes how inert everything around him is. Adria Arjona plays Martine Bancroft, the colleague and love interest, with nothing to do but stand near the science and react to it.
Daniel Espinosa directs from a script by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless. The action scenes render the vampire speed as smeared trails of CGI vapor that swirl around the combatants and obscure the geography. You cannot tell who is striking whom or where the blows land. The color grading drains the image to gunmetal and sickly green until the frame reads as one continuous murky wash. The editing cuts away from impacts before they register, so the violence carries no weight.
This is a film assembled from the leftover parts of better superhero movies. It gestures at a larger universe with a Michael Keaton cameo that connects to nothing the film has earned. The origin story arrives without stakes because Morbius is never a person before he is a creature. Espinosa has the visual vocabulary of horror and none of its conviction. The result is a vampire movie with no blood in its veins.