Movie Reaction: Bohemian Rhapsody

Formula: Walk the Line * That Thing You Do!

Let's be honest, there's only one way that anyone is going to make a Queen biopic. Sure, there's potential for a deep character study about a music icon coming to terms with his own sexuality in a time when it wasn't safe to do so. I'm sure plenty could be said about AIDS in the 80s. A kid with the name Farrokh Bulsara surely dealt with his share of racism in 1950s, 60s, and 70s England. It's very possible to use the story of Queen and Freddy Mercury to make a very thoughtful and challenging movie. That was never the movie that was going to get made though.

Queen is perhaps the most universally likable band ever. The Beatles are too big. People hate them on principle or to be contrarian at this point. Michael Jackson has way too much personal baggage that has gotten in the way of his musical legacy. Queen has a dozen, maybe two dozen or more, songs that as soon as they come on, people stomp their feet, clap their hands, or sing along to without even realizing it. Their sometimes wild experimentation worked too well. Someone is "basic" for liking Queen, even, when you think about it, those songs are weird. The music is radio friendly, stadium friendly, dorm friendly, road-trip friendly. Even if they weren't at the time, Queen is now the platonic ideal of the corporate-approved, four-quadrant rock band.

There's only one kind of Queen movie that's getting made, and it's a biopic that's oversimplified, all rise, with obvious villains, and ends with a 20 minutes recreation of their biggest show. I'm sorry,  but anyone expecting something different doesn't know how to read the room.

Bohemian Rhapsody isn't a great movie. In nearly every way, it's everything people have grown tired of about biopics. It covers too much time. It races through every event. It does that thing where three major things that obviously happened months apart from each other all happen at the same birthday dinner. It winks at the camera so hard that it scratched my cornea. The jokes are broad. The drama is surface-level. The people who control the rights of the music and the band members make easy villains out of outsiders and never let the main characters look bad. Seriously, every single fear I had about the movie turned out to be warranted.

But I still liked it.

The reason why is pretty simple: the music. Give me a three minute scene about the writing of "We Will Rock You" using a couple facts pulled from its Wikipedia page then play the song for about two minutes, and I'm going to get into it. That's just the nature of Queen songs. As long as one Queen classic plays every 10 minutes, that's enough of a distraction. For me, at least. A 20 minute recreation of the Live Aid performance really forgives a lot of other sins.

It also helped that Rami Malek is pretty good. I mean, he has to act through some really invasive prosthetic teeth and it's sometimes painfully obvious when he's lip synching a recording of Freddie Mercury singing, but he's otherwise really good. He knows how to fall just short of making Mercury into a cartoon. He's able to treat familiar biopic scenes like they haven't been done a thousand times before. The rest of the cast is OK. I don't know enough about the Queen band members to judge the casting of the other three guys. Maybe this was on purpose, but they didn't match. Each of the three guys look like they were picked by completely different casting agents for different movies. Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, and Joseph Mazzello have very different energies. It  was a weird mix and probably not accidental. Lucy Boynton gets a thankless role as Mercury's longtime girlfriend. Everyone knows where that's going except her. She does what she can with it. I rolled my eyes for a good 15 minutes when I realized what they were doing with the EMI executive played by Mike Myers.

Bohemian Rhapsody is definitely one of those movies that I'll like less the longer I think about it. It's the bad kind of hokey in so many ways. You can see the fingerprints of the surviving band members (who were consulted for the movie) in every scene where Freddie goes out of his way to share the credit for a song or melody*. The crowd shots during performances are laughable. Everything is sanitized beyond recognition. Every bit of edginess is sanded off. I kind of hate the movie until the moment I decide to watch it again.

*The other guys in the band do deserve way more credit than they get. The way this movie is structured though makes it very clunky. This is a Freddie Mercury movie, not a Queen movie. If they wanted it to be about the band, they should've structured it completely differently and attempted to give everyone equal screen time.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend