Following his performance as Super Mario… sorry, Paolo Gucci in House of Gucci, Jared Leto returns to the big screen with Morbius, a film in which the multifaceted fashionista and Jesus Christ impersonator plays Michael Morbius, a scientist with a strange blood disease who, on his quest to find a cure for his condition performs a daring experiment involving bats only to find himself transformed into a vampire who has to -and I quote- “drink the red or die”.

Obviously, he is not a fan of Chardonnay.

Before things get a little bit messy, we must understand how we got here, and to do so, we have to take a look at the past. Way back in 2017, after the release of Spider-Man: Homecoming, the creation of the Sony’s Spider-Man Universe -catchy, innit?- was announced, meaning that in future appearances of the superhero played by Tom Holland, characters like Venom and Morbius were going to be introduced. After the former got his first picture with Tom Hardy in 2018, the entertainingly bonkers and over the top Venom -which got a sequel released last year-, it was a matter of time before they got another person named Tom to crack on with the villainous vampire. As they did not manage to convince neither Tom Hanks nor Tom Waits to play the title role, they got Leto, probably based on his experience with a character in connection with bats, having cosplayed as the Joker in Suicide Squad.

At this point -before the studio chose Daniel Espinosa to direct-, things were shaping up for the film, as they already had a script by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, writers of The Last Witch Hunter -have not seen it, but I think that is not going to change any time soon-, Gods of Egypt -I have seen it and I wish I had not- and Dracula Untold -which, to this day I still do not know why they told anything at all-. So, with all that talent put together, the film was filmed in order to be released in summer 2020. What could possibly go wrong?

As it turned out, many things, but mostly Covid… it was almost as if nature was trying to tell us something.

The film got delayed, and delayed – from July 2020 to March 2021, then to October 2021 and finally to January 2022… until it got delayed again to April 2022. Scenes were added and reshot. Michael Keaton -who had played Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming– showed up on a trailer, connecting the film to the Tom Holland Spider-Man universe. However, there was a feeling in the air that this film was going to be a stinker -maybe also because of all the fancy patchouli that seems to be oozing from Leto at all times-.

And, in a surprise to few, Morbius is not a good film.

To see a film like Morbius and expect to see a masterpiece, would be cruel. However, I strongly believe that there is nothing remarkable about films whose sole purpose is telling the origin story of a new character that will be appearing in countless other sequels, while setting up another multiverse in which your favourite heroes will surely show up… or is it that nobody remembers what happened with Tom Cruise’s The Mummy?

In an ideal world, audiences would be as indifferent to Morbius as Leto himself appears to be in the actual film (perhaps because there are no chances for him to get award recognition on this one). For one hour and thirty something minutes that feel like time is stretching ad infinitum, Leto goes from scene to scene showing us his lusciously dishevelled looks -in a few shots it seems that you are watching Jesus Christ in a perfume ad-, drinking synthetic blood from an IV bag like thirsty child slurps a Capri Sun, or actually looking at his watch to see how much time he had to be there – action that I had been doing several times as well, making the suffering of his character immediately relatable.

It is a shame that we are not in an ideal world, as whilst Leto pranced around with his dark mane and his pure white shirt -that never gets stained by the colour of blood… sorry, red-, actors like Jared Harris or Matt Smith are not given much to do. The former playing a father-like figure for a few scenes, and the latter having some fun and actually using his teeth to chew some scenery as Milo -previously named Lucien, until he met Morbius, who for some reason changed his name-. I wish I could say something about Adria Arjona’s character, but she has nothing to do -literally spending some time in movie coma, the kind of coma in which the patient never looks bad-. Having her playing the damsel in distress is a shame, and indicates that more things should be done when it comes to female characters in films today.

Whilst it could be said that Venom was a terrible mess, it is tremendously enthralling, never failing to keep your eyes glued to the screen to see what insanity is going to happen next. Morbius, on the other hand is an exceedingly dull film that has the audacity to set up a shared universe whilst being woefully unoriginal -rehashing ideas and concepts seen umpteenth times before in better films- and so terrible that it would be unfair to say it is uneven, as that might make people think there are good things in it.

Trust me, I have checked and there is nothing good in this.  

P.S. Sorry for the unavoidable pun in the excerpt, but I got a headache from writing about Morbius and I could not avoid going for the easy way out.