Movie Review: "Bohemian Rhapsody" Is No Pleasure Cruise

Mamma mia, mamma mia, mamma mia let me go.

Rami Malek—an actor divinely engineered to portray Freddie Mercury on film—has fittingly been cast as the infamous Queen frontman in Bohemian Rhapsody. Call it a kind of magic.

The problem is he’s condemned to do it in a contrived biopic with dialogue that goes beyond being merely bad and winds up in the realm of the diabolical. Very, very frightening indeed.

Malek’s also saddled with the fakest dentures outside of It. Sure, Freddie Mercury really did have mighty chompers. However, his skull still looked, you know, human, and not at risk of falling frontways out of his own mouth. Not so here. Too mean? Don’t stop me now. (Okay, that’s the last one, I promise.)

Those gnashers are the film in its totality; a laughable, unnecessary outsizing of a legend. Director Bryan Singer—if we can even call him the director; more on that later—races through the story of Queen, choosing lazy shortcuts, cutting corners and painting in the broadest strokes imaginable, when realism would have also been fine. It doesn’t even take the full two-hour and fifteen-minute runtime for the suckiness to set in; from the first shot of Malek’s maw, we see they aren’t exactly striving for subtlety.

Maybe that befits the band? Queen was, after all, an outrageous, bombastic collective who created and conducted anthemic, arena-ready songs that often verged on the operatic. They were a little bit broad, and a lot cheesy, and occasionally went for the easiest melody. But say what you will: there wasn’t another band like them, and there are plenty of biopics like this one.

Bohemian Rhapsody begins in the early 1970s, with Farrokh Bulsara (Malek) disappointing his Indian Parsi family by joining U.K. college rockers Smile, made up of guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy). Swept along by Farrokh—rechristened Freddie Mercury—and his commanding stage presence as lead singer, Smile brings in bass player John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello), adopts the band name Queen, and quickly dominates the live music scene before recording an experimental album. Eventually, we witness the making of their magnum opus, "Bohemian Rhapsody", much to the confusion of a record exec (Mike Myers) puzzled by its baroque flourishes and "nonsense" lyrics. Later, in just one example of the film’s reliance on dramatic irony, we see negative reviews for the now-classic song superimposed over a re-enactment of the music video (presumably because the negative reviews for the movie hadn’t been filed in time).

The screenplay is credited to Anthony McCarten, though this project has been in development for yonks, with different writers tinkering in the background and Sacha Baron Cohen previously attached to star (as a tribute, Rami Malek was made to look like one of Baron Cohen’s melted-headed characters from Who Is America?, I assume). Nonetheless, the script stinks. The characters are each given preternatural foresight, speaking solely in aphorisms that indicate everyone already knows where the band and Freddie are situated in history. (Words actually exchanged: "You're a legend, Fred." "We're all legends.")

Even Mike Myers makes a sly joke about the scene in Wayne’s World where they headbang to "Bo Rhap". It’s a movie of knowing winks and watered-down kinks, as McCarten and Singer (?) dance around Mercury’s decades-long struggle with his sexuality and mangle the timing of his AIDS diagnosis for dramatic effect. Lucy Boynton plays the love of his life, Mary Austin, with dignity. Mercury's male partners aren't afforded the same courtesy.

At least it’s full of Queen songs! Each is a welcome reminder of the band’s expansive catalogue, ingrained in us from birth, emphasised by the fact Malek’s singing vocals have been overdubbed for maximum authenticity. I certainly left Bohemian Rhapsody still liking Queen, so that’s something.

How much of the film Singer directed remains questionable, as he was allegedly booted during production, with Dexter Fletcher (only credited as an Executive Producer) stepping in. The flick certainly has the family-friendly vibe of Fletcher’s previous efforts, Proclaimers musical Sunshine on Leith and Eddie the Eagle. Yet Fletcher insists he really only helped shoot the final third, and having seen the whole movie, I don’t blame him for only wanting 33 per cent of the credit.

That’s because Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t just a screenwriting failure. The staging is also often baffling, with Malek delivering one quiet monologue in the rain many metres away from another character and facing in the opposite direction. I appreciated the melodrama of the moment; I’d appreciate it more if Singer & Fletcher were actually making a genre-busting biopic that properly reflects its subjects, and not just kowtowing to the same conventions already mercilessly skewered by This Is Spinal Tap, Walk Hard and Flight of the Conchords.

The most bizarre choice comes at the end. After racing through or compressing (if not editing to the point of misshaping) so many key moments in the Queen story, we stop to spend 15 minutes watching them reprise the band’s performance at Live Aid in 1985. It’s a triumph of recreation, and utterly pointless. Malek, a revelation in Mr. Robot, is a sensitive and physically faithful Mercury, and his co-stars are decent lookalikes striving, sometimes successfully, to give their characters dramatic life. But why’d anyone want to watch them do the Lip Sync Challenge after two long hours, when we just wanna get out, just wanna get right outta here?

2/5

In cinemas 1 November. Rated M for coarse language.

Header Image: 20th Century Fox