Morbius arrives with a tagline that promises a new Marvel legend. What it delivers is a 105-minute origin story that never finds a reason to exist beyond the next franchise slot.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
A Nobel Prize and a Boat Full of Bats
Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) has spent his life fighting a rare blood disorder. He meets his surrogate brother Milo (Matt Smith) in a Greek hospital when both are ten years old, and the two bond over wanting to be normal. Their adoptive father, Dr. Emil Nicholas (Jared Harris), sends Michael to medical school in New York. Twenty-five years later, Michael publicly turns down a Nobel Prize for his work with artificial blood.
That refusal is the last interesting choice the film lets him make. Michael secretly captures dozens of vampire bats from Costa Rica, hoping to splice their genes with his own. Milo funds a private mercenary vessel in international waters to run the experiment. The cure works. It also turns Michael into a vampire who kills the crew and drains them of blood after they attack him in fear.
He erases the CCTV footage, contacts authorities, and jumps overboard. Back in New York, he has superhuman strength, speed, and echolocation. His artificial blood stops satisfying him.
Milo Takes the Cure
FBI agents Simon Stroud (Tyrese Gibson) and Al Rodriguez (Al Madrigal) work the victims and deduce Michael’s involvement. Milo learns Michael is cured and is furious when Michael refuses to cure him too. After a dead nurse turns up drained, Michael believes he is responsible and lets Stroud arrest him. In prison, Milo visits, and Michael realizes the truth: Milo took the cure and killed the nurse.
Smith’s Milo is the film’s one live wire. Espinosa pushed him toward a bold, villainous performance, and Smith embraces the identity whole-heartedly once he turns. Leto, by contrast, plays the role close to his own personality — he has said the part was less character-driven than his usual work and did not require his method approach. It shows. There is no hunger in him, just a man in a lab coat reading his lines.
“A new Marvel legend arrives.”
The tagline is doing work the film cannot. Morbius is the third entry in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, following Venom, and it carries all the strain of a shared universe built from the supporting players. The character had been circling a screen adaptation since 1998 — first as a Blade antagonist, then as a solo Artisan Entertainment project. Neither happened. Watching this, the long delay reads less like bad luck and more like a warning nobody heeded.
The Score
Morbius scores 3.5 of 10. Here is the ranking of what actually sinks it:
- The script. Sazama and Sharpless wrote a cure story with no cost and a villain with no argument.
- The lead performance. Leto is a void at the center of a film that needs a man at war with himself.
- The action. Superhuman speed and echolocation, and still nothing on screen moves like it matters.
Michael Keaton appears as Adrian Toomes, a name that will mean something to audiences who saw him elsewhere. Here it means nothing. The film ends where franchise films end, promising a next chapter nobody asked for.
The parts worth keeping are Smith’s glee and Michael’s refusal of the Nobel — a scientist who will not take the prize because the prize is not the cure. That is a real character. Morbius spends the rest of its runtime forgetting him.
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