Jared Leto and Matt Smith are an outstanding doctor and his evil nemesis respectively, both grappling with the power to change into an evil demon
With a snarl, with a roar, with a facial morph into horrible sub-Voldemort nasal loss and then back to being handsome, the Marvel superhero-vampire Morbius is with us. And sadly his superpower is being bafflingly dull. His story unfolds with all the dramatic shape of a screensaver and then ends – to be followed by two plonkingly anti-climactic post-credit stings whose sheepish purpose is to lay out more coming attractions from the very corporate Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU). in case we justifiably felt that all this was a bit of a letdown.
Jared Leto plays the nobly dedicated Dr Michael Morbius, who affects a Charles Manson-style long hair-plus-beard combo to go with his gaunt unhealthy manner and Richard III caliper-canes. The poor man suffers from a blood disorder and has dedicated his life to a cure – so much so that he gets the Nobel prize for medicine in an early scene, but he’s such a badass that he turns it down at the ceremony. Or something; we never quite find out what he does or says to the poor old King of Sweden. But the point is supposedly that Dr Morbius had formed a lifelong friendship in a children’s hospital with the kid in the next bed with the same condition – and he grows up to be a needy, greedy individual called Milo (Matt Smith), quite without Dr Morbius’s ethical superiority.
