This is one vampire that will drain your will to live before he drains your blood

Morbius is the cinematic equivalent of a vampire without its fangs—bloodless, toothless, and utterly lifeless, a movie so anaemic, it needs a transfusion of energy and invention that never comes. Despite a source material rich with potential and a competent, if oddly miscast cast, the film flounders at every turn, delivering a muddled and uninspired addition to Sony’s flailing Spider-Man adjacent superhero universe.

Jared Leto stars as Dr. Michael Morbius, a biochemist with a rare blood disorder who, in a desperate attempt to find a cure, transforms himself into a living vampire after an experiment with bat DNA goes predictably awry. Leto’s performance, informed by his trademark method acting weirdness leaves his Morbius an intense but inert creation, devoid of the sense that there’s anything at stake. His transformation into a more vampiric form, which should be a highlight of the movie, instead can’t even compete with Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s TV budget prosthetics from the late nineties.

Matt Smith co-stars as Milo, Morbius’ childhood friend, and fellow rare condition sufferer who has been funding his work and, would you believe, undergoes the same transformation when he takes the experimental treatment against Morbius’ advice. So far, so predictable but in a movie which is so relentlessly dull it could induce sleep in an insomniac, Matt Smith is the only one that seems to be having any fun with the campy potential of a superhero vampire h However, even his charismatic villainy can’t salvage the film from its abysmal script and shoddy execution. His attempts to inject life into the dreary dialogue only serve to underscore the film’s myriad shortcomings. He can’t singlehandedly save the film, of course, but he does make you hope that this isn’t his one and only shot to make his mark in the wider world of Marvel movies.

The cast is rounded out by Adria Arjona, playing Martine Bancroft, Morbius’ colleague and love interest, but her role is so underwritten, she might as well be a cardboard cutout with “Love Interest” scribbled on it and Jared Harris, as Dr. Emil Nikols, Morbius’ mentor, who looks as if he’s perpetually questioning his life choices, especially the one that landed him in this cinematic snoozefest.

The plot is derailed by incoherent storytelling and a script that feels like it was cobbled together in a series of frantic meetings over a weekend bender. The film is riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies. There’s a point where a big deal is made about a character being a “single mother of twins”, yet when her apartment is searched, only a cat is found, with no children in sight. It’s as if the filmmakers were playing a game of narrative Mad Libs, with logic being the first casualty. One of the main problems is that Morbius has no idea what it wants to be. Too bland to be a superhero movie and far too tame to be a horror movie, it falls into the no man’s bland in between. Had the cast and crew had the guts to really go for it and push for a hard-R horror take on the material, there might have been a chance. As it is, the horror elements are so muted they might as well be on a tea break, and the superhero aspects are too lackadaisical and uninspired to hold anyone’s attention. The climactic battle between Morbius and Milo is a particularly dismal affair, an underwhelming spectacle marred by chaotic editing and an over-reliance on digital effects with fight sequences so poorly choreographed, even the excessive use of slow-motion shots can’t provide any clarity.

Espinosa’s direction is so lacklustre, it could serve as a case study in how not to direct a marquee movie and the score, so cravenly and obviously influenced by Hans Zimmer’s work on The Dark Knight, feels derivative and delusional, as if it drifted in from a different, far superior movie and decided to stay out of a sense of embarrassed pity. This bat man might be the hero Sony deserves, but he’s the one nobody needs right now.

Maybe Morbius’ most egregious, unforgivable sin, though – aside from the mind-bogglingly stupid mid-credits stinger scene that suggests that nobody at Sony has a clue what the multiverse is or how it actually works – is that it’s just plain boring; an underwhelming, poorly executed film that leaves viewers yearning for the intervention of the likes of Blade to put this vacuous vampire out of our misery. A dreary, forgettable entry in the superhero genre that neither thrills nor terrifies, failing even as a vaguely supernatural medical drama with zero-sum charismatic performances and insipid effects. It’s a movie best left in the shadows, but let’s be honest, even the shadows would reject it.