‘Morbius’ Boasts Solid Performances Alongside Major Story Issues

The long-delayed Morbius (originally slated for a July 2020 release) is finally coming to theaters. Based on the vampiric Marvel anti-hero and frequent Spider-Man foe, the film boasts a solid set of central performances but feels like an an incomplete script that will provoke many more questions than it answers. Tragically, it’s a film that had every element to succeed and couldn’t stick the rhetorical landing.

Jared Leto plays Dr. Michael Morbius, a man long-plagued by a rare and fatal blood disease. It propels him to become one of the world’s foremost experts on blood diseases, but his desperation grows until he tries a novel (see also, unethical and illegal) treatment: a fusion of human and vampire-bat DNA. It helps his ailment, sure, but he’s left permanently transformed, powerful, and thirsty for blood. He has to war against his newfound urges and an antagonist far more ruthless than he.

Morbius boasts a number of successful elements. Leto’s Morbius is a fine performance throughout—from the vulnerable, dying genius to the struggling new anti-hero, he lands the character’s range and makes him feel both dangerous and empathetic. Adria Adjona is great as Dr. Martine Bancroft, capturing believable determination, intelligence, and authority with a charismatic air, and Matt Smith excels as longtime Morbius friend Milo/Lucius (who shares Leto’s condition).

Some of the action sequences get a little visually confusion between the pacing, choreography, and the VFX, but a lot of them really work. Script-wise, the first act is successful by-and-large with strong pacing, well orchestrated flashbacks, and a solid set up for audiences to sympathize with the titular post-human predator. The largest issues, however, also pertain to the script—there are many essential questions that are left dangling and obscured, and some of them are pivotal to understanding the story and its characters.

Morbius gets his powers from cutting edge gene-splicing between human and bat DNA, sure. That’s the entirety of our explanation in the film, and yet that doesn’t explain almost any of his demonstrated powers: augmented strength, bullet-dodging speed, the ability to at least glide despite a lack of wings, or becoming basically a bat-God that can command hordes of the flying rodents. Why can he fly? Why does he so visibly transform when faced with bloodlust? Why does a drop of his blood… well, that’s a spoiler, but it causes a massive effect on another character that makes no sense in the film world.

Beyond powers, there are other questions the audience is left wondering about. Much is made of Morbius’ distaste for the thought of drinking human blood, and his concern that artificial blood (that he’d invented) will no longer be effective. It’s an often-repeated crisis point, the ‘ticking clock’ of his increasing tolerance to artificial blood. At the same time, he’s one of the foremost experts on blood in the world. Having a massive supply of human blood on hand (from voluntary donors, no less) wouldn’t raise any alarms anywhere, from anyone. So why does the character see his choices limited to 1) artificial blood and 2) having victims? They don’t establish the blood needs to be fresh, after all!

There’s also a substantial character turn that’s never once ‘teased’ in that character’s traits or past, so it’s an odd and confusing shift that sorely needs prefiguring. Most of the film’s most consequential turns and significant elements are abrupt, under-explained, and/or rest on shaky ground in terms of their believability. Following a year of many, many overlong films, an under-2-hour runtime is great BUT here a little extra information in many spots would eliminate a host of problems.

Many elements are also only partially integrated into the film, leaving the feeling that they belonged in a prior draft of the script and that we’re seeing the byproduct of an incomplete revision. The police investigators, with notable performers in Tyrese and Al Madrigal (Madrigal is great here), are set up as though they’ll be a more important element of the film and yet they just… aren’t. (They do manage to incarcerate Morbius, somehow, and it makes no sense at all). We see that Morbius makes three doses of the transformative substance that gives him the vampiric affliction, so you’d think that all those doses matter to the story. Not true. He later takes over a secret lab in the middle of the city on a whim, and by the way it’s scripted and cut it seems like it was a minute walk away. Good on that lab for being conveniently exactly what he needs at exactly the second he needed it, and for him figuring it out rather miraculously.

The unfortunate thing is that Morbius is a film which has the elements of a more successful movie in its DNA. On paper, a lot of those aspects could work if they were given the development, nuance, and proper pacing they require. Instead we’re left with a film that certainly has good elements but which regularly fail to meet their potential, one that feels like it was shot from a draft that was in the middle of a substantial revision. Pity.

Morbius glides into theaters this Friday, April 1st, 2022.