Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 2004 David S. Goyer film Blade: Trinity. Today, he looks at the 2022 Daniel Espinosa film, Morbius. This article will contain spoilers.
Greetings Morbheads! It’s time to take a look at Morbius, the 2022 Marvel superhero film directed by Daniel Espinosa and starring Jared Leto that confusingly took hold of the Twitter zeitgeist for a couple of weeks because of how bad it looked (and more importantly, because of how tired everyone was of Jared Leto’s shit) and convinced a bunch of marketers that buzz meant attention meant dollar signs. I suppose everyone who had to learn this lesson about exclusively online meme buzz for an upcoming film the hard way from Snakes on a Plane (2006) had graduated out of the business by 2022, and it was time to learn it all over again; the ironic positive reaction online famously led Sony to rerelease the film back into theaters in June of 2022 following its April release, where it bombed even harder.
That’s probably the most interesting thing about this movie. Rotten Tomatoes has it on 15% fresh from reviewers; it was nominated for a bevy of Razzie and Razzie-like awards; it has a reputation of being one of the worst superhero movies of the past however-many years — this is a bit much. The movie doesn’t earn all that. There’s a Sony/Fox/Columbia Marvel Film Template stretching back all the way to Daredevil (2003) for urban vigilantes which Marvel more or less exploded when they took over running their own shop and started connecting all their films together but which remained in effect for the holdouts being made by traditional studios even up through Kraven the Hunter (2024) — they’re siloed off in their own little world, you get twenty to thirty minutes at the front of the movie with a child actor of the protagonist, we move on to the main plot where the villain is revealed to be intertwined somehow with the hero’s childhood past, and the hero vanquishes the foe from his origin and the foe in the present (regardless of whether they’re one and the same, as in Morbius, or separate, as in Daredevil with Matt’s Catholic Trauma and Kingpin) and emerges from the plot fully ready to tentpole a franchise which with a 100% success rate never gets off the ground. The only one of these to get a second film, let alone a trilogy, was the Tom Hardy Venom film which both structurally and tonally bucked this trend by not doing all the generational trauma stuff and having a lot of fun with it. Morbius, on the other hand, is the most rote it can possibly be and fails to clear any bar you’d care to set for investing people in a sequel. The post-credits sequence has Michael Keaton’s Vulture parachuting into this universe to try to salvage the next film, for God’s sake. That film thankfully never arrived.
A word about Leto, a famous alleged creep whose public accusers over the year can now be counted in the dozens, with nine coming forward in the latest batch — this man is such a nothing, such a complete and total zero, at every creative act he’s set his mind to that people have turned to conspiracy theories to try to explain why he’s as prominent in the culture as he is. There is nothing wrong with his performance of Dr. Michael Morbius in any technical sense, not in the way that people thought Nic Cage was a terrible Johnny Blaze in the Marvel Ghost Rider films. But you know what? Even though Cage did do a bunch of ridiculous stuff in those that confused the mood and made the spectacle himself instead of the ghostly spirit of vengeance, he was still Nic Cage! Nic Cage is an interesting dude to watch on a movie set, walking around and doing stuff! Leto goes through the motions and delivers a precisely-calibrated, completely forgettable, completely generic leading man performance from maybe the most generic leading man looking guy in Hollywood. He is an empty hole in this film. And it’s not entirely on the material or the director leading him down this path; Matt Smith, who between his turns as Dr. Who and Prince Philip in The Crown has long become an old hand at playing weirdly manic English creatures, is having a lot of fun in this movie — he turns himself into a vampire for fun, he kills people for fun, there’s an entire sequence where he celebrates his newfound mobility by doing a creepy-cringy rich guy dance number as he dresses himself in a suit and New Balances and ties his own tie for the first time in his life; Matt Smith is great. Jared Leto sucks the life out of this whole thing.
The plot is very simple: Morbs (Leto) and Milo (Smith) grow up as young boys in hospital for a crippling blood disease that will kill them, cared for by some guy (Jared Harris, as checked out and check-cashing as you’ve ever seen him) Milo will kill later for cheap heat. They swear to be brothers to each other always. They grow up into a brilliant experimental biologist/hematologist and crime boss, respectively. It’s unclear how Milo did all his crimestering while still suffering from their debilitating condition, which involves a lot of crutch acting and limb work. Morbs invents a serum that cures his condition but also turns him into a vampire, and immediately kills eight goons on a boat in international waters where he was doing this research (this detail seems to be here entirely for an unearned ref to Dracula and the Demeter drifting into port). He is very sad about this and decides Milo can’t have the vampire cure. Milo disagrees, of course, and immediately becomes a vampire supervillain. While there’s way too much wind-up and backstory in the movie’s first act — it’s almost a half-hour into the film before Morbius becomes a vampire — it’s refreshing how little moral struggle there is for Milo to go bad. We get the scene where Morbs tells him he can’t have the cure and he storms out; we get the scene where a nurse is murdered in the lab building horror movie style by a vampire we think is Morbs; we get the scene where the cops arrest Morbs for the murder and Milo visits him in jail to tell him he’s gonna get him out; and at the end of that scene, as Milo leaves behind his cane in the jail cell on purpose so his brother can piece together what’s just happened, Milo does the Usual Suspects/Scary Movie bit where as he walks out of the prison his limp disappears and he straightens up to his full height, because he’s a vampire now, baby! He’s evil and loving it!
This is the best stretch of the movie by far, starting with the nurse kill and going through what happens next, which is that Morbs figures out the play and instead of coming up with a clever plan to sneak out of jail or counter-ruse Milo, he simply smashes his way through the barred window and flies out into the night, flexing his own vampire superpowers. Milo, who is expecting Morbs to do this, has been marking time by killing a newspaper vendor who he baited into saying something vampire-phobic to him, as you do. They face off, do the requisite, “But I was your brother!” bickering, then head into the subway for the best scene of the movie, a slugfest where both guys are basically just Superman-type “they’re really strong, they can jump a lot, they’re tough, they punch real hard” bruisers but everything has Vampire Seasoning sprinkled over it: Lots of threatening purple auras and echo-location CGI and weird eyes and teeth and claws. Milo kills a bunch of transit cops. It’s pretty solid stuff! If you wanted to see what combat Disciplines from the World of Darkness tabletop game Vampire: The Requiem looked like done up with a full budget, this movie’s got Celerity, Vigor, Resilience, Protean, Auspex, and by the end Animalism all on full display — for this scene, the final fight, and maybe one or two other brief spots. The rest of it is a lot of Jared Leto trying to carry scenes.
After the subway fight we’re headed pretty briskly to the end; there’s a decent enough bit where Morbs sets up a new lab by tracking down a counterfeiting ring, tossing them out on their asses, and then DIY scrap-building the engine from the rotary printer they use to print the bills into a centrifuge to make blood serum for himself, which is in the realm of Comic Book Plausibility. Here we’re expected to get involved in the romance subplot between Morbs and Dr. Martine Bancroft (an incredibly bored and underutilized Adria Arjona) so that there’s some feeling when Milo eventually offs her as well; this doesn’t work. Finally Milo kills the Harris character, kidnaps the Arjona character while Morbs is out dealing with the Harris character’s death scene, fatally wounds the Arjona character so that Morbs can feed her some of his blood and then feed on her for strength (as Vampire: The Requiem players know, real human blood can sate your hunger and be used to activate your vampire superpowers, unlike animal blood or fake blood, but it also awakens your Beast), and we’ve got a final fight.
This final fight is mostly interesting for how it directly and shamelessly “homages” the Superman/Zod fight from the end of Man of Steel (2013), like shot for shot. They fly through the sky punching each other, crash through a bunch of skyscrapers, go upside down at one point, there’s a bunch of slow mo pans when they stop to hit each other and change direction; eventually they fight through a skyscraper construction site; it’s ridiculous. Instead of crashing down into a Grand Central Terminal knockoff they end up in a much more boring sewer arena, where Morbs does the one interesting thing in this whole duel, which is summon a swarm of bats which he first uses as a Bat Shield and then charges up to focus into a Bat Beam to take out Milo, finally stabbing him with the vampire killing hypo needle that he made in that counterfeiters’ lab (done up like a stake through the heart, of course). Morbs flies off into the night, a fully-powered up vampire superhero; Bancroft wakes up on the roof where she died, because she’s a vampire now too. There are also some FBI agents hanging around whose main job is to make time-filling quips; the only part they play in the whole plot is when they arrest Morbs to put him in jail so he can break out of it in the next scene. Credits.
This is solidly in the bottom third of the range of films we’ve covered so far in this space, and we’d have to watch a lot of really, really bad movies for it to move out of there, but if you were hungover and sitting on the couch on a Sunday afternoon and this was on TNT — a situation people are increasingly rarely in now, due to the rise of a la carte and on demand services — this isn’t the worst thing to have on in the background, if you’re past the first 20 minutes. Leto is easily ignored on your phone; Smith is fun; I like the fights a lot when they’re not openly plagiarizing a better film (and yes, Man of Steel is firmly a better film than Morbius). It’s not in the bottom five here at Century of the Vampire. But you probably have the choice of watching something better in this day and age, and given that choice, you probably should take it.
Speaking of movies that might help push Morbius out of the bottom third of the list, next week I start in on the Underworld franchise.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
