If the Venom film series began as a strange experiment in making Spider-Man without Spider-Man, Morbius is at once stranger still, and more mundane: A Venom without Venom, with Jared Leto as another super-monster who must try to contain the beast within. The newest entry in the SSMCU—Sony Sorta-Marvel Cinematic Underverse—casts Leto as Morbius, The Living Vampire. He’s the latest in a rich lineage of Spider-Man antagonists who begin as frustrated scientists, one of multiple mirror-shard reflections of the STEM-minded and mostly virtuous Peter Parker. This particular Dr. Frankenstein riff crossfades into Dracula territory, as Leto’s Dr. Michael Morbius—Nobel-rejecting genius, friend to children, master of origami—Goes Too Far when researching a possible cure for his rare, debilitating blood disease. Experimenting with vampire bats, he turns himself into a stronger but less predictable creature whose face can crinkle into a man-bat hybrid. His improved health comes with a newfound thirst for the sweet sustenance of human blood.
It’s all more horrific than the MCUPAL (Marvel Cinematic Universe People Actually Like) can handle, at least in theory. Like Venom, who Dr. Morbius nonsensically makes reference to while menacing a gang of counterfeiters, this character makes an immediate play for sympathetic-antihero status, with a lot of the gruesome stuff (Venom’s head-chomping; Dr. Mike’s blood-guzzling) elided, or limited to gun-toting, anonymous bad guys. Leto may specialize in preening, stunt-acting turns like Paolo Gucci or his ill-fated gangster imitation of Heath Ledger’s Joker, but he’s in belated (and largely unwelcome) movie-star mode here: The handsome, decent-yet-conflicted leading man. The weirdest aspect of this performance is how his attempts to go light, charming and virtuous sometimes sound like an actor trying to master a flattened-out American accent—like he’s imitating something he’s heard countless times without ever actually inhabiting himself.
It’s too bad Leto’s performance isn’t much fun, because at times, Morbius has some of the straight-faced B-movie absurdity that the low-rent Venom pictures keep winking away. Like its corporate sib, the movie’s true super-antihero is a snazzy bit of computer effects, more outré than the tastefully muted costumes of Ant-Man, Shang-Chi or Captain America. When he’s hungry or cornered, the doctor’s contrived bedside manner falls away as he becomes a sharp-toothed, beady-eyed, claw-handed monstrosity who whooshes through the air in a cloud of tinted CG smoke. It’s cheesy as hell, and I never got tired of looking at it; at times, the colorful smears of FX resemble ink bleeding across a comic page. Director Daniel Espinosa has a workmanlike touch enlivened by its passing resemblance to competent ’90s/’00s hackwork. That’s especially true of his collaboration with cinematographer Oliver Wood, an old hand at slick grown-up thrillers like Face/Off and The Bourne Identity, who gives this digital-era tentpole some film-like grain and texture (even if the substitution of England for New York City is frequently obvious). Sometimes it’s downright relaxing to be whisked through slam-bang efficiency, riding the glorious CG mists of a dumb vampire guy in a skulking hoodie.