Movie Review: Bohemian Rhapsody

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

Directed by Bryan Singer 

Written by Anthony McCarten

Starring Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Mike Myers, Aiden Gillen

Release Date November 2nd, 2018

Published November 2nd, 2018

Part of the reason I despise Bohemian Rhapsody so much is my own fault. I projected some very high expectations onto this Freddie Mercury biopic, expectations that were perhaps too high given my experience with similar movies, biopics of rock and pop stars. Take Ray for instance, I reviewed that recently and while Jamie Foxx is incredible, the movie overall was mediocre because it is trying to capture an outsized talent and personality in a familiar box of genre cliches, crafting a portion sized life of glamorous peaks and ugly valleys that rarely exemplify a real life. 

I should have known better than to expect a Hollywood biopic to capture the joy and sorrow, the genuine complexity of the life of a great artist. Hollywood has rarely done this well before and I don’t know why I expected Hollywood to do better this time. I should have been especially wary of Bohemian Rhapsody because the life of Freddie Mercury is among the most complex and tragic in rock history. It would take several movies to capture the multitudes of Mr Fahrenheit. Trying to do it in this one movie renders Freddie’s life drab and miserable outside of concert footage that could just as easily be enjoyed on vinyl recordings. 

Bohemian Rhapsody appeared, to me, to posit the life of Freddie Mercury as a struggle of almost constant pain, sorrow and loneliness. To believe the narrative of Bohemian Rhapsody is to believe that the legendary lead singer of Queen had no joy in his life whatsoever. His friends brought him no joy, his varied love life brought him only heartache and even his musical creations were fraught with the infighting of the band over writing credits and placement on each album. 

It’s apparent from the movie that the only time Freddie Mercury experienced anything close to joy was when he was on stage performing. The performance portions of Bohemian Rhapsody are pretty good. Problematic director Bryan Singer, who was fired part way through production, does give a unique look to the concert scenes with a genuinely innovative camera angle that looks out from Freddie's piano as he plays some of his most iconic songs live. 

Now, you might assume that the pain that Freddie Mercury experienced in his life off of the stage would fuel his creativity but you would be wrong about that. Not one single Queen song performed in Bohemian Rhapsody reflects Freddy’s heartache. For all of the rock and roll power of Queen, they were not a band that reflected upon themselves or life. They were about irony, humor and poetry. Somebody to Love perhaps could be the closest we get to something reflective but I will leave you to earnestly parse that song which is more about Freddie’s love of Aretha Franklin and the sonic experimentation of vocal layering but yeah, it’s called Somebody to Love so that passes the anti-intellectual pop psych, literal reading of the song if that’s what you want. 

Rami Malek does the best he possibly can with the material of Bohemian Rhapsody but he’s ultimately defeated by some of the worst and most awkward dialogue in any movie in 2018. Trying to sound like a human being while spouting some of the dialogue forced on him in Bohemian Rhapsody is a challenge that would defeat most actors. That Malek doesn’t come off badly is a strong testament to his talent. He was beaten before the cameras even rolled but he gave it a go and didn’t embarrass himself. 

The actors playing the rest of the band perhaps should have been played by extras for all of the depth they are given in Bohemian Rhapsody. We get thumbnails of the backgrounds of Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon but not much. May was a physicist in college, Taylor was a dentist and when Freddie insults John Deacon in one scene we find out he was once an electrical engineer. We know that Freddie called the band his family but very little of the movie focuses on that aspect, the script prefers wallowing in how miserable Freddie Mercury was when he wasn’t spouting awkward or banal dialogue.

I understand that the Brian May and Roger Taylor were involved in the making of the movie but if that indeed was the case, one wonders just how much they actually liked their late lead singer. As a character, Freddie Mercury is a wisp of a person with no agency of his own. Freddie’s life was always predicated on what others were demanding of him and how he joylessly followed their direction. This is especially true of how Freddie’s relationship with the band’s tour manager Paul Prenter is played in the movie. 

Prenter is portrayed as a cartoonish villain who bullied and cajoled the fragile Freddie Mercury into the life of a gay socialite, a life he never wanted if the movie is to be believed. Actor Allen Leech doesn’t help matters by playing Prenter as a complete weasel with only the worst intentions in mind for Freddie Mercury. Prenter likely was a really bad guy, his interviews after being fired by Mercury indicate an opportunistic slimeball but the portrayal in Bohemian Rhapsody is so comical that Leech should have played the part with a tiny mustache he could twirl in order to underline his villainy.

Mike Myers, that famously cantankerous cartoon of an actor, shows up briefly in Bohemian Rhapsody and serves to demonstrate the bankruptcy at the heart of the film. Myers functions like a terrible meta-dad joke as he’s employed solely so that he can play a record executive at EMI who rejects the legendary Bohemian Rhapsody. Bohemian Rhapsody is, for those who don’t know, a song that Myers himself was responsible for returning to popular culture with his inclusion of the song in his hit movie Wayne’s World.

Someone thought it would be super funny and not terribly awkward to have Myers pointedly state that kids in cars won’t be singing along to Bohemian Rhapsody. Essentially, one of Queen’s most incredible artistic achievements gets reduced to a mediocre reference gag.  That Myers is also almost unrecognizable and using another of his nearly incomprehensible accents only serves to make the whole scene unnecessarily awkward while being terribly unfunny. The late career of Mike Myers will make for a fascinating documentary one day as few people of such talent have done so much to make themselves so completely repellent as Mike Myers has done in the decade since he was last a relevant performer. 

Yes, if you can’t tell, I loathe Bohemian Rhapsody. I have sympathy for Rami Malek and I love, love, love, the music of Queen but this movie is atrocious. The final act tries to redeem the abysmal whole by abandoning acting in favor of pure mimicry by having the cast re-enact Queen’s famed performance at Live Aid but it is impossible to escape the fact that we are watching pantomime and not performance. You could have as much fun listening to the movie soundtrack, which carries the entirety of the Live Aid performance re-enacted here and you could do so without having to spend time wallowing in Freddie Mercury’s seemingly endless suffering.