At last, after a development period longer and more troubled than A Star is Born, the life and career of Freddie Mercury and Queen has been chronicled on film. But more than that, one of the boldest, most visionary, most fearlessly creative minds in the history of music is portrayed by a popular Hollywood actor (Rami Malek) in expensive prosthetics and a dutifully-recreated accent as only the real legends get to be.
I jest.
I do not doubt there was a point at which Bohemian Rhapsody could have been a worthwhile movie. There was a period in which a film adaptation of Mercury and Queen’s story felt like such an obvious inevitability that it made no sense one had not already happened. Mercury was an icon as musically creative as he was vocally talented and as impossible to limit as he was to define. A cinematic recounting only made sense. But after losing so many directors and Sacha Baron Cohen as the lead and disputes with the band, its production looked less and less likely. Meanwhile, over the last decade, historical biopics had become so stale in the public consciousness that it felt utterly satisfying to not only accept that some lives and figures were so iconic that film could never adequately capture them but also agree that Freddie Mercury was one such figure.
Not only does Bryan Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody fail to produce anything suggesting it understood Mercury, Queen or even their music on any conceivable level, but it disgraces all three by stuffing them into the most ill-fitting, overlong and obnoxiously generic script imaginable. It is a film with no originality, little respect for its subject and absolutely no idea how to treat or represent any of the music or brand it is tasked with bringing to life.
Look no further than the film’s utilization of famous Queen music. These are songs that have appeared in countless films across four decades in a hundred different ways. Queen has a unique voice in storytelling, and any time their four-part harmony plays over any sort of character or emotional beat, it becomes a shorthand for setting the scene’s tone and telling the viewer how to feel about it. The best Singer is able to do to let Queen’s music have a voice in the telling of its own creation is as the backdrop to uninspired montages they loosely connected to, if at all.
At no point does the film show the creative process behind any of the group’s biggest hits. We have no indication as to how Queen discovered and mastered their unique and iconic sound, they simply do. Even the sequence in which the band records “Bohemian Rhapsody” offers no insight as to how the song came to be, only a handful of snippets showing them record the most recognizable riffs and sequences. We are given no explanation as to where the lyrics came from or what inspired Mercury to write it as an operatic rock ballad. The songs have no connection to the group or its story beyond being their latest money maker. Even if no official record of Mercury’s thought process exists, a filmmaker with more skill than Singer could infer and suggest some origin to his inspiration rather than count on his audience to fill in the blanks with what they know and expect of both rock music biopics and Mercury’s life.
Instead, the film attempts to snapshot Mercury’s bombastic personality and the effect it had on his bandmates. It is a surface-level depiction that actively undermines the singular trait that made both Mercury and Queen one of a kind and made their story worth telling in the first place. And it does this in favor of suggesting their story is identical to every other band we have ever seen hit the big time, even as the band constantly tells the people around them that Queen is not like other bands. The film actively and unforgivably works against its characters and the subject it is supposedly attempting to honor. The soundtrack is so detached from the band on screen, it becomes impossible to believe that one created the other.
Bohemian Rhapsody may sell itself as the story of Queen, but it is all about Mercury from start to finish. The other band members, Brian May (Gwilym Lee), John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) and Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) are given nothing to do but be a platform for Freddie to bounce off of. The cast can entertain and crack a joke with ease, but these characters have nothing to distinguish themselves from each other beyond their increasingly wild hairdos. Their personalities are interchangeable and they all seem to take turns clashing with Mercury’s ego and antics, so no exchange between bandmates is ever meaningful. No one is ever given an arc to follow, and the most distinguishing thing about them is the instruments they play on stage.
There are so many suspect moments between the band and orbiting individuals. Sometimes, an exchange will result in a contrivance to discover what would later become part of Queen’s iconography. Other times, the story sticks so rigidly to clichéd character beats and conflicts that are peppered with bizarre choices and actions in an attempt to give the band some sort of identity. Just from cursory knowledge of Queen, we know there is no conceivable way the true story unfolded the way it is depicted in the film. But Bohemian Rhapsody is so blinding in its generalized mundanity that I could not have possibly cared less what was true or false.
Regardless, Rami Malek absolutely tries with his central performance as Freddie Mercury. His makeup transformation is impressive and his accent is well-honed, but he never conveys that he has any real connection with the role and the performance seems only surface-deep at best. He is given one monologue toward the end that he nails, but the film’s portrayal of Mercury and his life reads as so mangled, dishonest and even cruel, that it sedates any meaningful emotion the third act attempts to restore.
The film attempts to wake itself up in its closing 15 minutes with the concert at Live Aid. After breaking up and reconciling, the band reunites and puts every past grievance and thought aside for a 20-minute concert in front of 1.5 billion people. It is undoubtedly the best scene of the film. The passion on Malek, the band and the audience’s faces push it over the edge to become possibly one of the best concert scenes in movies. It is nearly as moving in its execution as it wishes it were, and at the end of a movie more interested in understanding its subjects as people, it would have audiences sobbing.
But Bohemian Rhapsody is far from the movie it’s ending or its subject deserves. It is everything we have come to hate about biopics, particularly music biopics, in the last decade. It is as generic and recycled as Queen is unique. It presents no originality, vision or purpose to a man who was overflowing in all three. It feels unmistakably like the very last thing the real Freddie Mercury would ever have wanted. It insults his memory by drowning it in the cliché and conventionality the real man seemed to loathe. If Bryan Singer showed this movie to Malek’s Freddie from the film, as he supposedly worked hard to represent the real person, Mercury would have taken it out of the projector and thrown it at his head.
Singer and the script writers never had any idea how to approach this subject matter, but they arrogantly barreled through its development anyway. If this movie is to be the death knell for 20th Century Fox, you can find me wearing white at the funeral. And as for the band, signing off on this awful movie’s production can be chalked up as one of its biggest blunders—right alongside “Bicycle Race” and “You’re My Best Friend.”
Rating: 3/10
