Bohemian Rhapsody | 2 ½ out of 4 Stars | Rated PG-13
By Kyle Osborne
Man, I really, really wanted to love this movie. I’ve loved Queen and Freddie Mercury since 7th grade. Seared in my memory is seeing the video for the song Bohemian Rhapsody when it was first released (a full 6 years before the launch of MTV, when music videos were pretty rare) with a flamboyant, otherworldly Mercury punching through the TV screen. These guys looked and sounded like no one else. They were exotic and even mysterious to a 12 year old.
We all bring our own personal and varied backgrounds to the movies we watch, of course, and it’s probably not fair to blame films for not matching our personal expectations. I’m just saying.
The new biopic Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t a bad movie but it is a conventional one, which is possibly the worst thing you could say about it, considering how thoroughly unconventional this band were. There’s a certain corny vibe that seems to go along with showbiz biographies, and this film is all too content to aim for average, checking off all the boxes within the genre. Humble beginnings, clueless record execs, blah, blah, and blah.
What saves the movie from completely falling into the abyss is the magnetic performance by Rami Malek as Mercury. He looks like him and moves like him and seems to capture the essence of one of Rock’s greatest front men without doing an actual impersonation. It’s not Malek’s fault that we come away not really knowing anything new about Mercury. We long to get under his skin and to understand how someone who grew up looking like Mercury could have ended up holding a crowd of more than 100,000 people in a stadium in the palm of his hand. Alas, we learn no more than an old episode of Behind The Music would have revealed.
The other saving grace is the music itself. Queen’s Brian May and Roger Taylor are Executive Music Producers on the film, so getting music rights was not only a given, but a necessity, and the pay off can’t be overstated. Those great songs come to life, not least of which is an extended closing sequence that re-creates most of Queen’s performance at Live Aid in 1985. You can see the original 25 minute set on YouTube and marvel at the movie’s accuracy.
So we have the perfect example of a mixed review. Great lead performance and fun concert sequences, but a ho-hum, by the numbers narrative. And bad wigs. The rest of the cast are unremarkable.
One other thing I thought was weird–they screw with the timeline for no apparent reason. In the movie, the band are performing Fat Bottom Girls before Bohemian Rhapsody has even been recorded. Later, we see the birth of We Will Rock You after Crazy Little Thing Called Love is a hit. Why? Who thought it was okay or even necessary to switch around the chronology? Especially when fans will know the difference and be distracted?
I think I just realized that it’s 12 year old me whose expectations were not met. Maybe that’s why, for better and for worse, this feels so personal.