Bohemian Rhapsody won’t rock you, just bore you

Bohemian Rhapsody contains an engaging performance from Rami Malek, but does little more than imitate Queen without explaining why they rocked.

We always mourn the versions of movies that never got made, like Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon film or David Cronenberg’s version of Frankenstein. Watching Bohemian Rhapsody was bittersweet, since it’s hard to watch without thinking of Sacha Baron Cohen’s attempt to bring a Queen biopic to the screen for several years. Cohen’s version was deemed unsuitable by the remaining band members who didn’t want a straightforward Mercury biopic that dabbled in his dark side, and sight unseen it had to be better than what we received.

The film hits several major milestones for the band, from their origins to the recording and release of A Night at the Opera, their brief break-up and reunion for 1985’s Live Aid concert, and Freddie Mercury’s (Rami Malek) death from AIDS with absolutely no context, timeline or interest in emphasizing why these are important. If you don’t know everything about Queen and can fill in the gaps, it’s hard to justify their importance, regardless of how many people in the film refer to Mercury as a “legend” or the band’s work as a “masterpiece.”

Earlier this year the film underwent a controversy after director Bryan Singer was fired from the production two weeks before principle photography was completed. Though his name is retained as director, per DGA rules, it’s apparent the  film was found in the editing room or never existed to begin with.

Nearly every element the film deals with is truncated and rushed. Mercury is written, fully formed, as an outcast who can’t please his Indian father, though it’s unclear whether this animosity stems from Mercury’s sexual ambiguity, his love of music, or what. Immediately the soon-to-be Mercury meets the other members of Queen — Brian May (Gwilym Lee), Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy), and John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello). Despite the claims from Freddie that he’s been following the band forever, there’s no understanding of why he’s drawn to this group of guys, short of them being the weirdest assembly of men to start a band; May was an astrophysicist while Taylor was studying to be a dentist.

The band doesn’t rise to fame short of just having it handed over, or at least that’s how the movie plays it, with the next scene showing the recording of an album and being signed by EMI. Their rise is so meteoric it makes Tom Hanks’ parody band in That Thing You Do! look struggling, and yet Queen is presented as the most generic band in the world. With such an emphasis on getting to specific periods in time there’s no development or discussion of Mercury’s persona — just his last name is revealed with a single line not worth paying attention to — or the musical processes inherent in the band. Brian May talks about getting “experimental,” and we watch the band float speakers over microphones, but there’s no discussion of why there’s a need to be experimental. It’s as if the members of Queen exist in a vacuum, and other music doesn’t exist. You can’t look at why something is unique if there’s nothing to compare it to. Anthony McCarten’s script just hopes you know other bands.

The actual musical performances are powerful, but only because Queen’s songs are great fun to listen to. Rami Malek struts across the stage with the power of the best Mercury impersonator, but his lip-syncing is so obvious the whole affair comes off like the longest episode of Lip Sync Battle. (There’s also some truly terrible CGI that hints at the gun this movie was under.) By the time the film presents Live-Aid ’85, the performances are so choreographed and fake it’s akin to watching a Pepsi commercial that seeks to remind you “Hey, I wish I was watching Queen videos right now.”

Malek is forced to carry this film, and much of his performance is flamboyance and kitsch masquerading as personality. With his fake teeth and penchant for grandiosity, the musical sequences allow him the greatest berth to give a performance, but even then it’s a concert, not an acting turn. Malek certainly makes you believe he knows the character, but this doesn’t translate to the audience understanding Mercury. His longest-lasting relationship with Jim Hutton (Aaron McCusker) plays as an offensive afterthought, developing in the final few minutes of the film merely to check off the box that, yes, Mercury had relationships with men, to. The actual relationship we’re given time to is Mercury’s relationship with Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) whose character is so basic and underwritten you have trouble remembering her name. So much appears to happen off-screen, with the other band members mentioning wives and children that were presumably happening while Singer was on vacation. The only characters with depth? Mercury’s cats.

All of this leads to a biopic on par with something you’d watch on VH1. Events happen with an “and now” quality. And now we see Mercury might be gay. And now he’s on drugs. And now he’s going to leather bars. There’s no complexity or discussion of how anyone feels about anything, yet when the band does break up it’s laid solely at Mercury’s feet, proof more of the living members’ desire to keep themselves clean than get at the root of the frontman’s issues.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a film that has no clue what it wants to do, short of giving us a Queen cover band and recreate their musical performances for two and a half hours. The script is packed with nothing but filler. Singer’s direction is meandering. The film becomes a two-hour advertisement for Queen’s Spotify playlist.

Go watch Freddie Mercury videos on YouTube and you’ll end up with a better experience.