MORBIUS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Here we go again. Yet another origins story from the Marvel stable given the whizzbang blockbuster treatment, this time one whose extensive Wikipedia page (I've never heard of any of these characters so I have to look all of them up afterwards) suggests is actually a long-standing Spider-man villain who occasionally swaps sides to join forces against an even bigger evil. As a standalone movie, this one seems to recast him as a reluctant hero rather than an outright bad guy: a scientific genius transformed into a monster by his own experiments and now struggling to retain his essential humanity and morality and conquer his need for fresh human blood.

Morbius (sadly nothing to do with the medical horrors of Doctor Who's 1976 story The Brain Of Morbius) is actually Michael Morbius (Jared Leto), victim of a rare blood disease since childhood and creator of an artificial blood which has helped with countless battlefield injuries. Experimenting on himself with a serum derived from South American vampire bats, he turns himself into a vampiric monster who cannot control his thirst for blood and his need to kill. But his only friend Milo (Matt Smith), suffering from the same illness, steals the serum for himself and embraces his new powers and freedoms...

Eventually it comes to a head, as these things always do, with the two beating the hell out of each other and flinging one another through buildings and walls and pavements in what is frankly the most boring manner possible. It's the dullest and least enjoyable Marvel movie thus far and frankly gives the glummest of the DC franchise a run for its misery money. There's no fun to be had and it's difficult to care who wins, so all you're left with is the whizzy CGI. Worse, it ends in the usual way with teasers for the next film (maybe), dragging in Michael Keaton's The Vulture from Spider-Man: Homecoming and possibly setting up something that Wikipedia suggests is a supervillain group called The Sinister Six, because they're going to keep milking this damned thing until the heat death of the Universe at least.

While it's nice to find a comicbook movie that doesn't climax with cities, planets or whole Universes up for casual and meaningless destruction, and settles for a body count of maybe twenty rather than Thanos' billions, Morbius is still thoroughly uninteresting stuff. Yes, the CGI and monster effects are perfectly good, but we're now in an era where good CGI is as much a standard as the film being in focus and there's no excuse for anything less than pixel perfection. You could wonder what dimension this is happening in if The Vulture has suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and/or whether it's part of the Multiverse which may or may not be explained in the next film, or the one after that. Or you might just wondering why they're still bothering with this nonsense (apart from the money, obviously) and, by extension, why the audience is still bothering.

**

AMBULANCE

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

Michael Bay is back, and in a change from our usual programming this is suddenly something to be welcomed. Shorn of the rubbish "humour" and grubby sexualised leering at "college girls" and underwear models from the tiresome Transformers movies and their increasing idiocy, and with the action and screeching tyres cranked up beyond all human reason, Ambulance is two parts Michael Mann's Heat, three parts Speed, and seventy-three parts Shouting Like A Maniac - and I loved it. It has no subtlety, it has no nuance, it has no restraint, it has no depth. It's all storm and no calm, all orgasm and no foreplay.

To be strictly fair, it does have an opening bit that sets up the three main characters: military veteran Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) needs fast money for family medical costs, so hooks up with his not entirely unprincipled criminal not-really brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) for a couldn't-be-simpler bank heist that very morning. But then everything obviously goes spectacularly wrong, bullets fly and Danny has the brainwave of taking over the ambulance sent to get the seriously wounded cop out of the building. They also take the paramedic Cam (Eiza Gonzalez) hostage to look after the patient because if the cop dies they'll likely be facing the electric chair. What else can they do but run for it?

Screaming through traffic on the opposite carriageway, formulating plans on the fly, trying to keep the injured cop from bleeding to death and performing emergency surgery on him via Zoom: Ambulance keeps raising the stakes until it's forced to come to a kind of ending after another endless gunfight with even more trigger-happy gangsters. Who these guys were and what their significance was supposed to be remained unclear: much of the dialogue is bellowed over the din of blaring sirens and cars smashing into one another, so those minor little details will probably have to wait until the subtitles on the Blu-Ray. Meanwhile, just sit back and watch two hours of mayhem and destruction and explosions and shouting, much of it captured with magnificent if slightly vertigo-inducing camera drones. Michael Bay directs all this with his boner as usual and who cares if he's still got no idea about character or coherent narrative? He is primarily a crash bang kaboom action director (Bad Boys, The Rock) and no other filmmaker can shoot a family saloon corkscrewing across the screen in slow-motion in an orgasmic shower of sparks and fire quite like him.

It's based on a Danish thriller of the same name that doesn't seem to have got a release over here (and is an entire hour shorter, because Michael Bay clearly doesn't think a mere eighty minutes is anything like enough). I enjoyed the hell out of Ambulance far more than I was expecting given some of the terrible films he's made (Pain And Gain is a particular offender) and whilst I'm not going to suggest that it's a gem deserving of a whole mantelpiece of awards, it's great slambang fun and dizzyingly put together. I left the cinema exhausted. And the Fast And Furious series now needs to seriously up its game.

****