One of Marvel’s most enigmatic and tormented characters, anti-hero Michael Morbius, arrives on the big screen played by Oscar-winning actor Jared Leto. Infected with a rare and dangerous blood disease, determined to save anyone who is destined to suffer his own fate, Dr. Morbius attempts a desperate bet. What initially appears to be a success soon turns out to be a potentially more dangerous remedy than the disease itself.

MORBIUS:

Some films have to thank for the bad resonance they receive from overseas because when you go and approach them, the result is less and less disappointing than what had already been anticipated. Not all works, however, have the good fortune of being able to take advantage of a revaluation. 

When they arrive in another country and the mediocrity that America had announced after the first screenings of Morbius could only be confirmed again with its landing in Italy. A cursed work of which Jared Leto is the protagonist and which follows the questionable interpretation of Paolo Gucci in Ridley Scott’s film snubbed by the Academy. 

Although House of Gucci was a film that arrived more or less on schedule despite having to keep an eye on the emergency from Covid-19, it was distributed anyway before an operation left in the drawer for two years such as the one starring the cartoon vampire.

But Morbius is not only a couple of years late, but seems to have traveled in time alongside his adventure partner Venom, both of the Sony team, for a tour that in the mix of Marvel characters in parallel contexts and which touches only slightly with the MCU, however, it seems to have its own coherent and uniform form. 

Whether the direction for these products is functional or not is up to the individual films to decree it. But that the production house has found its own identity is undeniable and it is perhaps precisely the point from which to have to start to destroy what the symbiote and the vampire of the comics have generated to try to rebuild something new.

FROM THE TWO VENOM FILMS TO MORBIUS

Just like the film with Tom Hardy, Morbius also has an atmosphere of a past cinema that fits into a series of stories in the style of the nineties / early 2000s. An aspect of the narrative that reverberates in the perfectly distinguishable staging of the film, a work that seems to belong to a time when the plasticity of certain visual effects and the sparse structure of a story of “super” people were still accepted, in which however a pillar-like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man who could be, yesterday as today, timeless. 

Sensations that the promotional materials had aroused and that receive a due confirmation upon viewing the film, which while flying in its duration and still remaining consistent in its own points of the story, can only reveal itself unprepared in front of the new technological and narrative exploration of the Marvel comrades. – or, if you also look at your opponents, DC.

This is why Morbius generates almost more questions than real disputes, making it unclear how it is possible to consider an adequate type of solution that turns out to be chaotic like the one proposed by the film directed by Daniel Espinosa that affects the general result. 

Different yet close to that of the two Venom, with the latter aiming, however, more on the comic side that was able to help them safeguard themselves compared to doctor Michael Morbius, who is choosing to enter a seminal-thriller loses his grip on its origin story and does not even hit the mark for what concerns the use of the genre.

WHEN EVEN POST-CREDIT SCENES DO NOT WORK

Not being able to come to the defense of a technical apparatus whose choices it is difficult to understand – as in the long opening sequence with Michael and Loxias only children and a confusing and unproductive montage – is the story over which the vampire and his bats are circling. 

In the fraternal diatribe between the protagonist of Jared Leto and his childhood friend played by Matt Smith reside the potential that the writing has not been able to bring out, depriving the characters of an in-depth study that could have served as a carpet for the story, as for the theme of the debilitating illness of the two men and in the comparison on deciding to overcome it or not, at the cost of becoming inhuman.

A lack of investigation in the script that manages to make you feel the absence of depth even in its two post-credit scenes. And not that there is usually a need, but because Morbius has decided to insert two snapshots for a future game that is dangerous not so much for the characters, but for those who will have to approach unraveling the threads that the universe of superheroes has entangled. 

Thrown sequences that annoy rather than entice, no matter which character or which actors you decide to see inserted. Old-fashioned and difficult to save, Morbius is as artificial as the blood that the protagonist finds himself having to swallow: not entirely effective and quick to expire.

Morbius will be in cinemas from 1 April distributed by Warner Bros…