After having sealed the character (and the teeth) of the Joker in Suicide Squad by David Ayer and getting the wrong tone (and film) in House of Gucci by Ridley Scott, Jared Leto brings to the screen the look of Jesus Christ (superstar), which he now displays for, just before Easter, resuscitating as a vampire.
Lack of luck, there’s nothing to get your teeth into Morbiusby Daniel Espinosa (Life, Child 44): Sony’s other attempt to inject new blood into its Spider-Man Universe spectacularly breaks its teeth in a feature film whose only good thing to say about it is that it doesn’t stretch in length. In the kingdom of blockbusters, 104 minutes, it’s short. If only it didn’t seem endless…
For the record, Sony distributes films using Marvel characters for which it still owns the rights. This is how the studio offered us Venom by Ruben Fleischer (2018) and its sequel, Venom: vsit’s going to be carnage by Andy Serkis (2021). Offerings badly received by a majority of critics, but rather appreciated by fans, the last one having even made more than 500 million at the box office. Morbius had to slip between the two. The pandemic (which sometimes has a wide back) has forced the postponement of the film, which is now beginning to “bat-hover” in cinemas.
The antihero, who appeared in 1971 in the comics facing Spider-Man, is, in civilian life, Doctor Michael Morbius. Suffering from a rare blood disease that makes him live in slow motion but die in rapid motion, he grits his teeth over his microscope to find a cure. And it does, thanks to vampire bat DNA. Naturally, he doesn’t hear the alarm that goes off here in the head of any not too stupid individual and injects himself with the magic potion. To become a kind of vampire with superhuman powers, but, unfortunately, bloodthirsty; and, luckily, with a Cullen-like conscience (the immortal heroes of the saga Twilight).
Paint by number
From there, think paint by number. The script written on autopilot holds no surprises (when have we been so little on the teeth in a vampire movie?). The story progresses to the “teuf-teuf” rhythm of anemic dialogues. It is populated by cardboard characters (poor Tyrese Gibson and Al Madrigal, as federal agents who are taken out of the surprise box if necessary, and Jared Harris, as a good doctor blinded by his heart of gold). It drags on in two additional scenes which open onto everything and above all anything.
Oh, and everywhere an orgy of special effects to make your teeth cringe or howl (under the moon or not). The pavilion of the ears which “shudders” to illustrate ultrasensitive (ultrasonic?) hearing: to laugh out loud. But at least there was an attempt at originality. The rest is an accumulation of borrowings: the ” bullet time » from The matrix ; the flights of bats Batman ; the ultra-fast movements accompanied by the colored fumaroles of Nightcrawler in the X-Men. And then, this illustration of the speed of the characters thanks to accelerated cuts of slow motion, one-second freeze frames to start again at full speed: an often illegible visual mess.
As for the two antagonists, Jared Leto in the title role plays the charisma card with big blue glances imbued with “See my heartbreak”. In front of him, his “frènemmi” (Matt Smith, who does tons of it, to the point of taking himself for the Joker), who has decided that it will bleed. Except that, paradoxically, it does not bleed, or little, on the screen. We rip out someone’s throat, we drain someone else’s blood, but the bloodbath takes place off-camera… for reasons that have more to do with the film’s classification category than its logic. Of course, there is this scarlet drop that crashes on the lips of Martine (Adria Arjona) – she is the beauty of the beast. His destiny is, therefore, and unsurprisingly, written in the stars.
Speaking of stars, why a star and a half here? Because there are still people who got up in the morning to work on it.