Morbius
Marvel’s all-new supervillain feels only too familiar, albeit with an intriguing agenda.
Abs fab: Jared Leto
Can the multiplex accommodate yet another Batman? With Robert Pattinson still reigning supreme and two more Batmen due next year (played by Ben Affleck and old Caped Crusader Michael Keaton), the genuine article now arrives with a blast of echolocation and a whole lot of sexy science. Michael Morbius has spent his whole life in pain, the victim of a rare blood condition. But Michael has a brilliant brain. While still a boy, he remodelled a ballpoint pen to save the life of a fellow sufferer, Milo, after which a lifelong friendship was born. Twenty-five years later he is running his own lab in New York and has developed a synthetic blood that has saved the lives of millions – but not his own.
To embody a new Marvel superhero/supervillain may seem an unlikely career move for Jared Leto. A fanatical Method actor and famously picky about the films he chooses, Leto has seldom flirted with Hollywood, besides a four-year dalliance with Cameron Diaz. Yet Michael Morbius does seem a good fit. The moribund doctor occupies the darker recesses of the human psyche and, imprisoned in an anaemic, skeletal form, he recalls the heroin addict Leto played in Requiem for a Dream, for which the actor lost a staggering amount of weight.
Morbius is determined to harness his mental powers to find a cure for those like him, including Milo, whose own fortune is helping him to finance his research. Following a field trip to Costa Rica, and the seizure of a particularly ferocious species of bat, Morbius believes he is on the verge of a breakthrough. Confiding in Milo (Matt Smith), he admits that the experiment is “ethically questionable, very expensive and not exactly legal,” but is resolved to proceed at any cost – even to his own life. But what happens when you cross a bat with a man?
It is perhaps unfortunate that the film, the third instalment in Sony's ‘Spider-Man Universe’, shares so much with the second Venom film, The Batman (and all the others), as well as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, robbing it of a certain novelty. Nonetheless, it is a supremely handsome production, pumped up by Jon Ekstrand’s Hans Zimmer-esque score and with a strong female lead in Adria Arjona, as Morbius’s medical colleague. The screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless have also gone to some lengths to make the science behind the fantasy seem roughly plausible (the good doctor’s search for unique anticoagulants would seem to have paid off, albeit leading to incidents of exsanguination). Viewers can cherry-pick what they enjoy about the film, before it goes all CGI and loses its human compass. But judging by the mid-credits sequence, there will be more to come – after Leto has completed playing The Joker in another film.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Jared Leto, Matt Smith, Adria Arjona, Jared Harris, Al Madrigal, Tyrese Gibson, Michael Keaton, Zaris-Angel Hator, Charlie Shotwell, Joseph Esson, Corey Johnson, Clara Rosager, Barry Aird.
Dir Daniel Espinosa, Pro Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach and Lucas Foster, Ex Pro Jared Leto, Screenplay Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, Ph Oliver Wood, Pro Des Stefania Cella, Ed Pietro Scalia, Music Jon Ekstrand, Costumes Cindy Evans, Sound Ann Scibelli, Randy Torres and Peter Staubli.
Columbia Pictures/Marvel Entertainment/Arad Productions/Matt Tolmach Productions-Sony Pictures.
104 mins. USA. 2022. UK Rel: 31 March 2022. US Rel: 1 April 2022. Cert. 15.
