Despite Its Reputation as the Greatest Movie Ever Made, It Turns Out That 2021's Morbius is Actually Terrible!
Welcome to the latest entry in The Great Catch-Up, a new feature where I go back and write about the many fascinating, important, great and wonderfully terrible films that have come out since this site was launched back in 2017 that I somehow never got around to writing about. YOU can help determine what I write about for this column by voting in polls at this site’s Patreon page at or by becoming a paid Subscriber for my Substack newsletter Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas here. This time out the two choices were two widely mocked entries from the Spider-Man Cinematic Universe, Morbius and Venom: Let There Be Carnage. You chose Morbius.
As readers here are well aware I do not read comic books. Why would I? They’re just funny animal stories for small children. I’m too busy slam-dunking basketballs, doing wicked skateboard tricks and smooching hot babes to geek out over some dumb comic books.
I don’t read comic books because I’m cool and not a nerd but I do spend a lot of time reading the Wikipedia entries of obscure and semi-obscure comic book characters. Why? I don’t know. I guess I find superheroes and supervillains fascinating, but not to the point that I’d ever actually read their adventures in funny books for youngsters.
That’s how I became fascinated by Morbius the Living Vampire. Depending on your perspective, Morbius is either the stupidest or greatest creation in all of comic books: a superhero who is also a vampire, or alternately, a vampire who is also a superhero.
How could that not be at least a little bit awesome? Morbius has it all: vampirism, super heroism, super-villainy and, in star Jared Leto, our worst living actor and most obnoxious human being.
It was a proposition the public found almost obscenely easy to resist. The public did with Morbius what it did with The Snowman, a previous Great Catch-Up entry: it turned an almost perversely boring flop that had the bizarre misjudgment to treat lurid, pulp material with inexplicable seriousness, even solemnity into a hilarious and popular meme.
Also like The Snowman, Morbius is a terrible movie but a wonderful meme that brought out the best in online wisenheimers. The extremely online ignored the turkey Marvel churned out joylessly and instead fetishized a version of Morbius that exists only in fake cultists’ vivid imaginations.
Fans created a fake catch-phrase for Leto’s iconically idiotic blood-sucker in “It’s Morbin’ time!”, a parody of Mighty Morphing Power Rangers’ “It’s Morphing time!” and The Thing’s “It’s Clobberin’ Time!”
Ironic Morbius fanatics created a fictional “Morbius Sweep” and pretended that the film was rapturously received, the top grossing film of all time and a masterpiece sure to dominate the Academy Awards.
Sony adorably thought that people were making Morbius the meme of the moment because they liked it and wanted to see it in the theater so it was re-released and flopped just as hard the second time around.
A wisenheimer even started a campaign for a second re-release, claiming that the only reason the first re-release failed was because “We Were All Busy That Weekend.”
Yes, we all had a lot of fun with Morbius. That’s ironic considering that the movie itself is no fun at all with the exception of a wonderfully game villain turn by Matt Smith as Milo, a tragic soul who suffers from the same unfortunate condition as his pal Morbius but has fun with it.
We open with a prologue set in Greece twenty-five years before the action of the film. Morbius is so utterly threadbare and empty that cheap period setting would be almost obscenely appreciated. A few seconds of Hanson’s “MmmBop”. White Town’s “I Could Never Be Your Woman” or Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” would have provided me more pleasure than the film as a whole.
But no, we can’t have anything like that because it might fall loosely under the category of “fun” and director Daniel Espinosa is an unabashed enemy of fun. He can’t understand why anyone might find the concept of a vampire superhero silly.
Jared Leto certainly doesn’t think there’s anything funny or fun or goofy about playing a vampire superhero and he IS Morbius in the same way that he IS Joker if you are completely insane.
Morbius is anti-fun so this prologue documenting li’l Michael Morbius and his surrogate brother Milo’s blood disease and their father Emil Nikos’ (Jared Harris) desire to find a cure for their unfortunate condition is the opposite of enjoyable.
Michael Morbius is now the world’s greatest super-genius. So he is understandably played by the greatest super-genius of our world, 30 Seconds to Mars frontman and possible cult leader Jared Leto.
Leto went crazily over the top and failed miserably in his portrayal of the Joker in Suicide Squad. So this time instead of really giving it his all he is giving it his none. Instead of going too far he’s barely trying.
In that respect he’s like the film itself. It’s a throwback to the pre-X-Men, pre-Iron Man stage of superhero movies when studios seemed vaguely embarrassed to be in the comic book movie business and released modestly budgeted, thoroughly half-assed movies that reflected that mild mortification.
Nobody seems to have given much thought or consideration into any element of Morbius. A vampire superhero is a wonderful excuse to bring a horror movie aesthetic to an exhausted sub-genre that could benefit from anything in the way of novelty or originality.
The movie is dogged by a distinct lack of enthusiasm. This is not something people made because they wanted to; this is something that was made because people were compensated handsomely to make the ugliest fucking movie imaginable.
It’s all washed out darkness once Michael discovers a cure for his disease with an unfortunate side effect: hair loss. And erectile dysfunction. And Insomnia. But probably the cure’s biggest side effect is that it turns you into a vampire.
Let me assure you, dear reader, if I might paraphrase the movie The Apple, that it's a natural, natural, natural desire to meet an actual, actual, actual vampire. Michael does more than just meet an actual, actual, actual vampire. He becomes an actual, actual, actual vampire with an unfortunately actual, actual, actual desire to drink human blood.
He can’t help it! He loves the stuff! It tastes great AND it allows him to follow the sage counsel of Matthew McConaughey and keep on living. Unfortunately in order for Morbius to keep on living others have to start dying. In a violent frenzy Morbius attacks, kills and drains the blood of folks unlucky enough to work on a ship where Morbius is practicing science of the mad variety.
When Milo steals the cure and becomes both a vampire and a supervillain he is fucking psyched. All his life his body has been a prison and a problem and now he can fucking fly and drink blood and live forever. It’s a little bit exciting!
When Smith starts visibly enjoying himself it only highlights the defiantly un-fun, dour, serious nature of Leto’s performance. I wonder if, on the final day of filming Leto watched Smith and thought, “Shit, I could have been having fun this whole time instead of playing Morbius as Oskar Schindler, but a vampire superhero? Why didn’t I think of that? Is it too late to film a whole different movie? We could call it Zack Snyder’s Morbius and put it on Netflix to extraordinary success! I’ve done it before!”
Never!
Morbius is horrified at his monstrous need for blood and devotes his life to finding a cure with less unfortunate side effects but Milo loves his new life as a vampire. In doing so he points the way towards a Morbius that isn’t a crashing bore but rather a goofy, silly, gothic movie with a sense of its own ridiculousness.
Morbius is strangely devoid of humor and self-awareness but it’s also too boring to be unintentionally funny either. It turns out that everyone was right. The vampire superhero movie with Jared Leto does, in fact, fucking suck.
I probably would have been better off with the other choice, Venom: Let There Be Carnage but I suppose there is something to be said for diligently going back in time to ascertain whether or not all of the movies I’ve been morbidly fascinated by despite their reputation for fucking sucking do, in fact, fucking suck.
It brings me no joy to report that Morbius, like The Snowman, fucking sucks just as much as its dire reputation suggests.
I am so disappointed. I thought I was in for a Morbin’ good time. Instead it was nothing short of a Morbtastrophe.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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