Michael Review

0:00This is IGN. It's really, really bad. This is your IGN review of Michael by Sedan Adlaka. At this point in Hollywood history, one must succumb to the notion that the pop star as IP movie isn't going to change. Walk hard, lampooned it nearly 20 years ago. Dewey Cox has to think about his entire life before he plays, but the music biopic limped on at its most formulaic, culminating with the near-billion dollar success of Bohemian Rhapsody. Sometimes, people just want their favorite artist to play the hits, and who can blame them? With the rope parameters of this jukebox film making set in stone, one can only hope that someone will come along and shake things up from within. After all, a built-in audience is guaranteed, so you may as well give it the old college try. Unfortunately, Michael is not that movie, and Antoine Fuqua is not that filmmaker, which should come as no surprise.

1:00However, it's astonishing to note just how short the movie falls of the genre's already low expectations. In fact, it does the one thing no production should be able to do. It makes Michael Jackson, the king of pop, and one of the most controversial electric ground-breaking figures of the 20th century, utterly boring. Michael, as it exists in its current, largely incomplete form, is a frictionless, flat, paper-thin story that's so concerned with fidelity to bullet points and recognizable highlights that it robs its characters of soul, not to mention the actors playing them. After opening at some undetermined point in the 1980s where we only get a glimpse of Jackson's shoes, the story begins in earnest in the 60s with the formation of the Jackson 5, the Motown band of brothers led by an adolescent Jackson played by Juliano Cruz-Valdi, and managed by his domineering father, Joe, played by Coleman Domingo. It sounds simple enough, but this is where the movie's problems noticeably begin.

2:03In an effort to make Domingo look exactly like the family patriarch, the actor is saddled with awkward, limiting prosthetics that both inhibit his performance and give him the exaggerated appearance of a Dick Tracy villain, or worse yet, his son zombified appearance in the music video for Thriller. It's rigid and incredibly distracting. Volody, thankfully, provides a semblance of heart as a young, innocent Jackson living in his father's shadow, but you can practically set your watch to each time a new year is noted on screen in an art deco-type face, followed by a five-minute performance of one of the group's early hits, and then another, and another, and another. These early scenes also set a trend for how the other members of Jackson's family are portrayed. While a sister Janet is absent from the film of her own volition, Jackson's four brothers and bandmates are at best window dressing throughout the entire runtime. While Jackson himself is the only one who appears to have any kind of relationship or interaction with their father, Michael may be the story of someone being launched into global stardom,

3:07but the world outside Jackson's windows seldom seems to exist, the very same world that would embrace and reject him, adore and abhor him, and which would inspire some of his more sentimental tracks. That Michael is such a small and contained film is undoubtedly strange, but it's by no means a death now. After all, in lieu of the accusation's storyline, the dynamic between Jackson and his father ends up relatively central once the star enters young adulthood, where he's played by real life nephew Jafar Jackson. But gosh, is it ever hard to squeeze meaningful drama from these leftover pieces? The scant, father and son interactions become outstretched and silently repetitive. The plot, as expected, becomes mechanically focused on what song Jackson produced at which point in time. During this predictable unspooling, actor Keelan Derrell Jones gets a mournful close-up or two as the icon's long-suffering bodyguard Bill Bray, who observes his employer's isolation, but he never gets to do much beyond that, despite being the film's second or third most

4:10prevalent character by default. Love Jackson or Haydom, his oddities and idiosyncrasies were a matter of public record, but rather than engaging with his arrested development as something psychologically complex, the movie presents him as a bog-standard, misunderstood savant, as seen through someone else's eyes at a safe distance. There's hageographic whitewashing and there's whatever Michael is, a work that doesn't just seek to make Michael pure and altruistic, but does so to the extent that he becomes a cartoonish caricature of a philanthropic genius whose Christ-like light were forced to intuit. Perhaps a movie more honest in its intentions might have litter framed him with an angelic glow, but that kind of formal flourish is asking too much from Fuqua, a thuddingly literal journeyman who doesn't have the necessary skill or visual verve, as, say, Baz Lorman did for Elvis to capture any real dimensions of Jackson as a person or a performer. Viewers would be much better off rewatching a YouTube playlist of greatest hits, because

5:11when the movie strings his iconic classics back to back, like don't stop till you get enough human nature, want to be starting something and so forth, there's no avoiding unflattering comparisons. Michael or Bohemian Jackson is a film of listlessness and inhumanity that can't help but suck the energy out of the room. No matter where you come down on Jackson as a person, this film is entirely the opposite of what he was, both as an iconic performer and a controversial tabloid figure. Who would have thought that such a carefully controlled, estate-permitted biopic might actually do more damage to an artist's legacy by making him so uninteresting? Michael's IGN score? 3 out of 10. Thanks for listening to IGN. My name is Tony Jackson and for the latest updates on Michael, visit us at IGN.com.