raveling by helicopter to Costa Rica (a journey that looks like something from a Jurassic Park film), Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) sets up a curiously simple trap to lure out a colossal nest of vampire bats, hoping to discover a cure for his incurable condition. He’s been plagued by the inconvenience of needing constant blood transfusions, and requiring crutches to walk, for as long as he can remember, having grown up in a hospital in Greece some 25 years earlier, under the watchful eye of Dr. Emil Nicholas (Jared Harris). The young boy is also extremely intelligent, which ensures that he gets a scholarship to study medicine – leading to a career in working with blood illnesses. “You have a gift, Michael.”

He’s so successful at helping people like himself through working with artificial blood that he even wins the Nobel Prize – which he rejects, much to the chagrin of his longtime friend and fellow doctor Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona). But Michael has never stopped trying to fix his own specific ailment, going so far as to meddle with unnatural components, which is similarly frowned upon by his colleagues at a high-tech New York lab – as well as childhood pal Lucien, nicknamed Milo (Matt Smith). “You’re mixing human DNA with bat DNA.”

Although there are some scientific notions at play, along with sympathetic leads with physical disorders, this is a superhero movie, based on a Marvel Comics character. And so, it’s not long before an ill-advised experiment is conducted in international waters, granting Michael special powers – ones that not only give him extraordinary strength and speed, but also force him to drink human blood for sustenance. Employing generic horror movie tactics, the werewolf-like transformation (strangely more than Dracula) sets up a series of jump scares and moderate violence as the vampiric monstrosity clamors across ceilings, claws at his prey’s jugulars, and twitches in gruesome spasms (often paired with strobing lights and other visual gimmicks). Fortunately, Martine is mostly immune to his onslaughts, as she’s an obvious love interest.

As with typical lycanthropy subjects, Morbius doesn’t remember anything during his spells as a blood-drinker, which means he must come to terms with the damage he’s causing and to whom he’s inflicting it. And he’s assigned his own Van Helsing equivalents in the form of investigating team Agent Stroud (Tyrese Gibson) and Agent Rodriguez (Al Madrigal), who don’t have to dig too much to uncover the perpetrator. Of course, he’s a protagonist vampire, which means that, in a Jekyll/Hyde design, he nobly regrets his deadly mistakes and attempts to correct the curse. As a result, others must be more villainous and deceitful than Morbius.

While everyone approaches their roles with seriousness, offering up almost no comic relief, it’s tough to view this subject matter with the same sincerity. The story is just too derivative and uninspired (Michael fights against random criminals during his downtime), while Morbius’ movements are quite unconvincing, overly augmented by computer graphics. But perhaps worst of all is the anticipated dubiousness and then matter-of-fact-ness with which the authorities treat the bat-man, even after they witness firsthand the otherworldly things that he can do. “I’ve become something different.”

Like “The New Mutants,” this superhero picture merges action/adventure with horror, marginally striking a more effective blend. But the PG-13 rating is limiting, while the fight sequences pose their own problems, relying too heavily on nonsensical maneuvers and special effects that obscure genuine choreography. Flying becomes a comparably outrageous inclusion. A lot of the shortcomings could be forgiven, except that the plotting and dialogue are particularly tragic; such a small portion of the runtime knows what to do with itself that it continuously invents unrelated, unimportant sequences to add in extra interactions (the duration feels so much longer than it is). And nearly every line spoken sounds as if it was written to be as plain and straightforward as possible, so as not to confuse the most simpleminded of audiences. There might not be a single unexpected scene in the entire movie. “I’m starting to get hungry.”

– Mike Massie