Thursday, March 28

‘Morbius’ wants to be part of the Spider-verse, but for that it takes more than a villain without much charisma


The crossroads at which Marvel finds itself when setting up its Spider-verse, a embolado that he clearly aspires to because who is not going to like his own pocket Marvel Cinematic Universe, is considerable. He has the rights to a Marvel superhero called Spider-Man, he climbs walls and throws nets, but he can’t use Disney priority star Tom Holland. But he has a whole fauna of villains and supporting cast to pull from.

The problem is that Sony does not have the capacity (nor the creativity, for that you also have to know) to make its own MCU like Disney’s, outlined with square and bevel, with overwhelming means and an impeccable finish. And he has to make do with things like ‘Venom’ and sequels, movies that we like precisely because of their imperfections, their outbursts, their wild appearance reminiscent of the best B-series (when Captain America was by Albert Pyun, not by the Russo brothers) and his penchant for stepping on the accelerator and not looking back.

'Venom: There will be slaughter' is not perfect, but it shows that there are alternatives for superhero movies

But for that you need someone like Tom Hardy, a scoundrel capable of embracing physical comedy and mundane drama on the same plane and putting on monchito voices. And someone like Woody Harrelson to keep up with him. Unfortunately, Jared Leto is not, not even remotely, Tom Hardy, and his bet on a tortured antihero pulls more of the topic about him outsider superpowerful that of an authentic identity of its own, as the thunderous Venom of Hardy’s films had.

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Perhaps it would have been easier not to aspire so much to an origin story for a character that aspires to be developed in later films, and to improve a script marked by clichés: Michael Morbius (Leto) is a scientist suffering from a strange disease in the blood for which he seeks a cure. Analyzing the ability of vampires (animals, not fantastic creatures) to feed by coagulating the blood of their victims, he develops a serum that heals him, but also turns him into an animal thirsty for hemoglobin.

Morbius, the vampire who did not want

Morbius is a very minor character from the Spider-Man comics, but certainly an attractive one. It was born at the time of the classic monster craze that led to the creation of ‘The Tomb of Dracula’ a year later, and which was the origin of so many Marvel exploitations of horror icons. It worked the way the best Spider-Man villains always work: as a gloomy, leaden contrast to the chatty, youthful Wall-Crawler of the time.

But without Spider-Man by his side (something similar happened to Venom, but again: Tom Hardy), Morbius has to pull from the topic of the tortured vampire, devoured by the impulses that lead him to do evil (in this case a hunger voracious) but with a good heart, which is not only a well-worn convention of superheroes, but of the very myth of gothic bloodsuckers. The film does not make an effort to border on these tropes, but because of a script caught with pins (and which has possibly suffered even more in the editing room, where the story has been reduced to the minimum essence) no intention is noticed either. to break with those conventions.

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'Venom', critic: an irregular antiheroic epic that comes to the surface thanks to the charisma of Tom Hardy

On the positive part of the whole, without a doubt, a Matt Smith who boasts all the charisma that Jared Leto lacks, and who makes up a character that we won’t say much about, but that does overflow all the spontaneity that the film lacks. Not even the action sequences or the effects are noteworthy: the confusing montage to distract from the violence and the terrible digital effects still leave it below the, if nothing else, competent rollercoasters of action and bumps that are the worst MCU movies. .

From here we are the first to regret that a film based on a character known as ‘The Living Vampire’ does not work, but that is precisely what it lacks: some cheek and self-awareness that would have allowed it to exploit, for example, the urban environment , the vital contradictions of the characters or the delirious origins of superpowers. And not so much attention to a Spider-verse that, at this rate, it’s hard to believe that he’s going to get on his feet at some point.

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