Michael film evaluation: Even divorced from his difficult legacy, the Michael Jackson biopic is unwatchable | UNW

Who’s bad? This movie. This movie is really bad.

Michael Jackson the artist and the person left a hugely complicated legacy, and if this glorified and shallow biopic had been a half-decent film, it would’ve only added to the thorniness of the existing conversation.

It would have been much harder to ethically reckon a great film that deliberately papered over Jackson’s personal life, at best a lot of very odd behaviour, at worst, multiple allegations of child molestation over decades.

But as it stands, that is made much simpler by the fact that Michael is a terrible film. Even divorced from the accusations that would dog his later life, as a piece of cinema, Michael is so awful at times, you want to physically collapse into yourself from all the cringing.

Specifically, any time Bubbles the chimp was on screen. It was so uncomfortable, you might wonder if this estate-sanctioned reputational whitewash was actually secretly subversive because every interaction between this dramatised version of Jackson and Bubbles made him seem like a massive weirdo.

That can’t have been the intention. In fact, we know it isn’t. The purpose is so clearly rehabilitating (or reinforcing among his most ardent supporters) an image of Jackson as a musical genius whose eccentricities are the result of an arrested emotional development because he was a lonely and abused kid.

The repeated references to Peter Pan and Jackson’s love of Mickey Mouse, toys and his perception of his menagerie of pets as his friends, is supposed to sympathise him, but serves only to other him.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson (by way of brother Jemaine), Michael is a two-hour, listless slog.

The film spans from 1966 to 1988, charting Jackson’s origins with his family boy band, the Jackson Five, and then becoming the highest selling recording artist in the world, all while battling the demons created by his father’s, Joe Jackson (Colman Domingo), physical and emotional abuse.

It conveniently ends before the first child abuse allegations against him surfaced in 1993, levelled by Jordan Chandler. Although a “his story continues” lobbed on screen before the end credits threatens a second chapter, and if that happens, depending on the box, it will be intriguing to see how the producers will handle it (although we have an idea, more on that later).

A Michael 2.0? Sure, we’ve destroyed the environment and wage endless wars, but what did we, as a species, do to deserve more of this?

One of its worst aspects of Michael is a script that surprisingly has a human screenwriter, John Logan, attached, and not just an AI-assembled catalogue of greeting card platitudes masquerading as dialogue.

It doesn’t compute that Logan is the same man who wrote “My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius (…) father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife, and I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next” and also had Michael make tortured references to “healing” the world from a hospital bed. It just cannot be. And yet.

Perhaps the well-documented behind-the-scenes chop-and-change process beleaguered Logan’s original script.

As reported by Puck News’s Matt Belloni, as well as other media sources, Michael’s original script from 2023 (which was slipped, separately, to both Belloni and Leaving Neverland filmmaker Dan Reed), was to feature Chandler’s 1993 allegations.

As it turns out, as part of a settlement with the Chandler family, Jackson’s estate is forbidden from dramatising them or the events around their allegation. John Branca, a co-executor of the estate, is an executive producer and a character in the film, played by Miles Teller.

The estate didn’t tell the filmmakers, and that legal kerfuffle led to a significant rewrite of the film including reshoots that reportedly cost $US50 million on top of its already hefty $US150 million production budget. Michael was originally scheduled to be released in 2025.

So, the dramatic conflict in Michael fell to Joe’s abuse, Michael’s long process to free himself from his father and that burns incident from the set of the Pepsi ad.

All of which are very well-known, and therefore are not compelling narrative or character hooks in a whole new standalone movie.

It doesn’t help that the film has no depth and offers no real or new insight into Jackson’s emotional state during any of these scenes. Fuqua and his cinematographer Dion Beebe overuse close-up shots to fake a sense of intimacy because it’s glaringly obvious that otherwise none exist.

Jaafar Jackson has the moves down, especially his nimble footwork which mimics Jackson’s prodigious dance skills, but in terms of acting-acting, it’s mere impression. Not that he’s given much to work with.

But the kid actor, Juliano Krue Valdi, who plays a young Jackson is very cute and full of beans. Kudos to that charismatic child.

Domingo as Joe Jackson moves through each scene with the intensity of a predator, always leading with his shoulders, and despite his star quality, there is little shade to the character and much of what you read into that portrayal comes from knowledge gleaned elsewhere.

Nia Long plays matriarch Katherine, only ever referred to onscreen as “Mother” including by her in the third person, while the other Jackson brothers are interchangeable background characters. Janet Jackson didn’t give her likeness rights to the production (she was long had a tense relationship with the estate), so don’t bother looking for her.

Jackson’s contribution to pop music and especially for black artists cannot be understated. Those songs are still bangers and when Michael reverts to being basically the concert movie Fuqua wish he had made, it comes not alive, but at least not comatose.

The music is just so good. What’s not so good is the over-indulgent, melodramatic portrayals of fans fainting at Jackson’s mere presence. Once was enough, twice was too much, and what seemed like dozens of shots is just dumb.

But the music is not enough to rescue Michael from being unwatchable.

It’s also not enough to set aside all the allegations, which have been vehemently denied over the years and not proven in court, that have clouded Jackson’s legacy.

A large segment of his fans will declare him entirely innocent, others will be able to compartmentalise the art from the artist. But for a lot of people, Jackson’s work will always have that asterisk.

Michael is not going to change anything.

Rating: 1/5

Michael is in cinemas on April 23