Film Review: Jared Leto cuts a brooding, troubled figure in Morbius
Morbius Declan Burke Caroline Delaney
★★★☆☆
From his humble beginnings as a minor Spider-Man villain, (15A) developed into one of Marvel’s more complex anti-heroes, and one with a sharply defined dual nature. Suffering from a rare blood disease, Dr Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) vows to find a cure for the condition that could kill himself and his best friend Milo (Matt Smith) at any time, but when his researches lead him to splice the DNA of humans and vampire bats, Morbius becomes the proverbial bat out of hell.
The vampiric element of Morbius’ transformation is the most lurid aspect of his new identity — unable to control his manifestations, he experiences an insatiable thirst for human blood — but the character of Morbius (originally devised by Roy Thomas, here directed by Daniel Espinosa) owes as much of a debt to Robert Louis Stevenson as it does to Bram Stoker. The sober, well-meaning doctor who refuses a Nobel Prize on a point of principle is a contemporary Dr Jekyll who is transmogrified into a ravening Mr Hyde, and who suffers agonising pangs of conscience when he returns to his human form once more.
All of which means that Morbius is something of an outlier in the Marvel canon — despite his superhuman powers of flight, speed and echo-location hearing, Morbius is not a conventional superhero, but a self-created monster whose powers are employed to defeat his malign alter ego.
Jared Leto, lurking in the shadows like some resurrected El Greco saint, is superbly cast as the brooding, troubled Morbius, his sombre portrayal setting the tone for the entire film. Unusually for a Marvel movie, there is very little by way of self-effacing humour: the subject matter is treated solemnly and even reverently (the ship upon which Morbius conducts his experiments is called the Murnau, in homage, we presume, to the great German director FW Murnau, whose films included and ). Matt Smith delivers solid support, as does Adria Arjona as Morbius’ colleague Dr Martine Bancroft, but overall the film is less than the sum of its parts, and never really ignites.
(cinema release)
