Directed By Antoine Fuqua

Starring – Jaafar Jackson, Juliano Valdi, Colman Domingo

The Plot – The story of “King of Pop” Michael Jackson (Jackson). From his childhood of being the star of the Jackson 5, through times of abuse by his father Joe Jackson (Domingo). To his hit Thriller, and the purchase of Neverland Valley, into his tragic and unsuspected death on June 25, 2009

Rated PG-13 for some thematic material, adult language and smoking

Michael | Official Trailer

POSITIVES

If you’re someone who values scope and spectacle in a music biopic even more than subversive storytelling, then there’s little about Michael that will detract away from your experience, especially considering Antoine Fuqua goes out of his way to seamlessly replicate so many of the notoriously documented moments to Jackson’s iconography. What we essentially have here is a concert film that just so happens to have a linear narrative for contextual outlining, both with a thorough collection of cherished favorites appraising unlimited opportunities of audiences to sing along, as well as elaborately detailed concert footage that vividly articulates the magnitude of Michael’s limitless reach during the 80’s, with a variety of camera angles, far and wide, and absorbingly immersive sound designs that get you as close to the stage show as humanly possible, without the claustrophobic cluttering of overcrowded bodies attempting to push their way to the front. As to where Fuqua struggles off-stage with the foundational aspects that drive so much of the necessary characterization, his impact felt during these epically engaging performances keep this film and its production from ever feeling like a televised movie-of-the-week kind of quality, in turn conveying the infectious energies of Michael’s music and iconic dance moves, that felt so far ahead of their time for a still mostly conservative pop music charts for the time. Fuqua’s brilliance towards the seamless believability of the capture is made easier with a combination of costume designs and make-up that not only help transform these larger than life characters before our very eyes, but also captures the familiarity of trends that drove the popstar’s pageantry among performers, proving that the production spent ample time zeroing in on every spare detail, with the monumental Thriller music video recreation being among my favorite sequences of the entire movie, for the ways that even the editing and camera motions reflectively mimicked every unique likeness from the music video. While the production and direction are downright incredible, it’s truly the performances that take center stage here, particularly those of Jaafar Jackson and Colman Domingo, who commonly bring such a stoic stature towards characters who morally couldn’t be any different by the air of their actions cementing how others feel about them. For Domingo’s darkly depraved turn as Joe Jackson, the mentally and physically abusive father of Michael, it obviously takes him down some twisted avenues of expression towards his children, but even despite the one-dimensionality of his characterization, Domingo continuously rises to the occasion of appraising this toxically slimy component that oversaturates any room that he invades, with this realistically gripping portrayal of tough love that allows Colman (Unlike his peers) to dabble in some dramatic depth that goes noticeably missing by and large to the screenplay. As for Jaafar’s herculean task of emulating his real-life uncle, it’s tough enough to seamlessly replicate the authenticity of Michael’s demeanor, but it’s harder to capture his distinct vocal range, and considering this is Jaafar’s cinematic debut, the tremendously detailed rendering brings out the softly sensitive and caring side of Michael’s socially conscious demeanor, in turn leveling us with the kind of remarkable performance that feels like it brings Michael back to life for two hours, without anything that feels haphazardly like an impression instead of an interpretation. Lastly, despite the overbearing mess that is this movie’s screenplay, I think the one thing that it succeeds at is Michael’s connective element with his fandom, even at the risk of shilling hagiography that eventually comes to unfortunately determine this movie detrimentally. Between Michael’s empathetically kindhearted personality conveying that of a child that refused to grow up, and his music catalogue prospering a cross-demographic appeal that effectively tapped into the seemingly impossible white side of the audience, the film seems to convey Michael’s arrival as being the crossroads for an industry that was forced to change with the pressure that he put on television executives to play his music, practically overnight, allowing the single greatest angle for the movie to brandish intrigue off-stage, when every other arc feels like it’s continuously working against it.

NEGATIVES

Like a majority of music biopics before it, Michael is a sanitarily scrubbed and hollow exploration of one of music’s most memorable superstars, without anything even closely resembling thorough characterization or dramatic underlining to a movie whose production involved more off-screen influence from Jackson’s family than wanted or needed. While I’m not for shamelessly exploiting a deceased figure who did more good than bad with the world, I feel like the glossing over that this script does to such vitally informative aspects of Michael’s life makes it feel like one that can’t be bothered with even attempting to humble this larger than life persona, with no kind of deeper introspection towards the character to convey what an abusive father and overwhelming celebrity does to a man who essentially feels like a child at heart, and even when the movie does incorporate some semblance of dramatic gravitas to the movie’s one-dimensionality in tone, it not only involves Joe’s recklessness, but it’s resolved and dismissed just as quickly as it was introduced to the fray, failing to capture the darker side to the King of Pop, that served as the single most opportunistic component to seeing the movie. On top of this scrubbing, the script is all over the place with regards to its storytelling, evoking as many as eleven music montages throughout the two hour engagement, with seven of them happening during the movie’s opening half hour. As you can tell from this, the film spends more time with the adult Michael rather than the child Michael, and while that isn’t necessarily a problem in the grander scope of this massive story spanning five decades, it does elicit these abruptly jolting transitions forward during the most unsubtle of moments, leaving no sort of opportunistic context for the way Michael’s songwriting process possibly conjured them, nor any semblance of a chance to live within adversarial moments that tested his resiliency. While the songs themselves essentially serve as flimsy chapters to individualized sections of Michael’s history, their lack of pursuit of the aforementioned creative process, as well as some disappearing characters, points to the documented fifteen million dollars worth of reshoots that the production involved all the way to the last minute, specifically with Miles Teller’s portrayal and ensuing arc of John Branca, Michael’s music manager, being hemmed distractingly to the point of the movie conveying the character’s irreplaceable value, with so little example of such, making it feel like his role served a much grander purpose in the movie’s original cut, but now only pops up to reaffirm Michael’s stances on industry conflicts that challenge him, in turn wasting away a credible opportunity for Teller to show tremendous range in a transformative role that feels so foreign to anything that he’s played at this point in his career. If the hack and slash for Teller isn’t enough, the abruptly unfulfilling ending point for this movie’s narrative merely spans to Michael’s 1989 foreign tour, where he finally broke apart from the Jackson 5, before enacting an Avengers kind of fade to black on-screen text that says “Michael’s journey will continue”. Despite the hilarious cultural subtext of such a clumsily enacted device to shill for a sequel, it makes Michael feel so incomplete as an entertaining narrative, especially considering the final fifteen minutes of the movie involve three different tour performances, the likes of which are stacked so unceremoniously to the point that it finally implodes the inconsistency of the pacing, which to that point was already wearing thin on my patience with an overreliance on stage performances over introspective insight. If the numbers do well, and we do receive a sequel, it’s tough to believe that the Jackson family will allow a follow-up to include a majority of disparaging moments in Michael’s life to the forefront of the movie’s creativity, but considering this film takes the grander moments of Michael’s life in its roughly 25 year frame, it’s difficult to assess what else it could possibly fill that screenplay with, and it’s among the strangest of sequel-baiting that I’ve ever seen in my time reviewing movies. In addition, while much of the movie’s technical components follow Fuqua’s lead towards articulating the monumental magnitude of Michael’s industrial influence, the editing during downtime sequences involving interaction between multiple characters, brought tangible familiarity of my experiences with Bohemian Rhapsody, a feeling made all the funnier by the fact that the same man responsible for editing that Oscar-winning catastrophe, is one of three editors responsible for this one. Perhaps it’s a means of sharing the responsibility that makes the editing in this movie much improved upon his work in that predecessor, but there’s still this abrasively energized consistency to subdued conversational moments that don’t require them, particularly one involving Michael’s introduction to John Branca, which is framed like a back and forth game of mental chess, yet contains a smoothly seamless meeting of the minds that couldn’t have gone better, and considering these scenes are the moments that feel the closest to some advantageous insight towards Michael, their overbearing emphasis frequently distracted during the moments that required minimalizing, crafting anxious techniques that thankfully bared none of the inducing headaches of the editor’s previous work. On a side note, Michael also strangely exists in the same universe as Bohemian Rhapsody, on account of an unforeseen cameo that not only involves this actor portraying the exact same character that he did in that movie, but also a tone-shifting scene that embraced more nonsensical comedy for the opportunity, halting the momentum of the storytelling dead in its tracks, in order for this actor to sell schtick that feels like ad-libbing on the material.

OVERALL
Michael might serve as a care-free, manic-inducing opportunity for limitless fandom, on account of the movie’s dazzling stage performances and familial favorites adorning the soundtrack, but expansively it’s a dramatically flat, sanitarily scrubbed, and artificially hollow biopic that refuses to dig deeper, on account of off-screen influence that intrudes on-screen, wasting away mesmerizingly seamless performances from Jaafar Jackson and Colman Domingo in the process. While Antoine Fuqua effectively musters the magnitude of The King of Pop’s unreachable influence during the 80’s, the exploration goes unfulfilled, as a result of a flimsy script and finished product that feels directionless to the very last shot, conjuring a hagiographic reaffirming marketing campaign for the titular singer, in ways that feel inauthentic the longer that I think about it.

My Grade: 5.3 or D+