So Bohemian Rhapsody is the new film biopic about Queen… or Freddie Mercury and those three other guys. You know, Brian May, the blonde one, and the boring guy. I don’t mean to be dismissive of men of real, raw talent… but the movie kind of is. But that doesn’t mean its a bad film or that it doesn’t tell a reasonably good version of the Queen story.
Yes, this is the biopic of the rock group Queen that primarily follows Freddie Mercury. Which makes some sense as he was the front man and the most dynamic of the personalities. The film does assure us the four men were collaborators who couldn’t succeed on their own. It just doesn’t spend any significant amount of time on the other three guys beyond their interactions with Mercury.
But, hey, everyone is talking about Rami Malek’s performance as Freddie Mercury. And they should be. He’s really good here (and, really, he’s always been an interesting actor). He may not be singing the songs, but he’s performing them as solid as anyone could who wasn’t Mercury himself. It’s a great performance that doesn’t exactly make the movie great, but it drags it up from general “ok-ness”.
Because, yeah, the movie is generally a pretty by-the-numbers musical biopic. Not completely generic since ALL the performances are very good… but it does tell a tale with all the usual beats of a music biopic. Not a crime, but not as inventive as, say, Queen themselves were in their music.
One thing should be made clear though about the storytelling. Unlike a lot of early reports or Twitter meltdowns, this movie doesn’t ignore Freddie Mercury’s sexuality… and his somewhat confusing relationship with women. It clearly shows he was gay and has fairly chaste makeout sessions… it’s direct but its not explicit. The movie aims for PG13 and gets there. It doesn’t shy away from AIDS either. Are they toning down his wild lifestyle? I dunno. Maybe. Does it hide from it? No.
As to the other guys in Queen, I really liked all three actors and really wish there was time in this movie to explore their lives too. I mean, what was it really liked to be the boring one in Queen? What does it mean that your wrote “I’m In Love with My Car”… a song they make fun of on numerous occasions. I kind of wanted to follow these three guys at least a little bit.
Anyhow, the film is also only 3/4s finished, unfortunately. It ends with a nearly 20 minute re-staging of the Live Aid concert which is genuinely a fantastic sequence. No longer a fuzzy 30 year old video on YouTube, it nearly restages the whole of the Queen concert with new camera angles and focus on different things. Plus it comes not too long after Freddie tells the band he has AIDS so the songs suddenly have added potency. And, of course, the audience interaction, abbreviated for the film, are given more importance by the film’s themes. I’ve seen that real footage a few times before… this version brought a tear to my eye. It’s a sequence so much better than the rest of the film.
This is a pretty good film that ends with a pretty great concert. It’s a good, but not complete, overview of the band Queen and a good, but not complete, biopic of the life of Mercury. Given that the flick is 2hrs 15min long, I get that they had to trim it down to fit. I think their story could make a good limited run tv show to fill in all the missing bits. As a film, it’s never boring, fairly average, reasonably fun, and occasionally great. I recommend it to all Queen fans, surely.
Score: 85