Movie Review Bob Marley One Love

Bob Marley One Love (2024) 

Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

Screenplay by Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers, Zach Raylin, Reinaldo Marcus Green

Starring Kingsley Ben-Adir, Lashana Lynch, James Norton

Release Date February 14th, 2024 

Published 

You can tell that Bob Marley One Love has four different credited screenwriters. The film has the chaotic feel of too many cooks in the kitchen. That's not to say that this is a bad movie, as music industry biopics go, this is among the better ones. Rather, it's just an observation of the style and tone of the movie which seems to shift gears oddly. You can sense a herky jerky quality of visions for the story changing and merging, and ideas not entirely cohering. The chaos comes however, in a haze of marijuana smoke and good vibes that prove to a saving grace. 

Bob Marley One Love stars Kingsley Ben-Adir as musician, radical, and revolutionary, Bob Marley. A star beloved around the world, Marley once wielded so much power that warring factions of Jamaica's would be leaders, vied for his attention, alternately threatening and offering to protect Marley from harm. All the while, Marley asks for none of this responsibility, accepting the kind offers from both sides while naively hoping that he can bring the two sides together by the sheer force of good vibes. Bob Marley One Love portrays the star as a man overwhelmed by wielding far more power than he deserves and a desperate ache for peace for himself and the people who have raised him to such a position of power in his home country. 

Capturing the contradictions of Bob Marley is actor Kingsley Ben-Adir who has a knack for playing historic figures who died before their time. Just a few years ago, Ben-Adir gave a stirring performance as Malcolm X in the movie One Night in Miami, a stagy but compelling based on a true story drama about Malcolm trying to recruit Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke, to rally together and use their collective star power in the fight for Civil Rights. In that film, Ben-Adir's casual charisma took a bit of the edge off of Malcolm X, making him feel real and human versus the outsized radical reputation assigned to him by a society seeking to blunt his influence. 

Find my  full length review linked here. 

Movie Review Flatliners

Flatlines (2017) 

Directed by Niels Arden Oplev

Written by Ben Ripley 

Starring Elliot Page, Diego Luna, Nina Dobrev, James Norton, Kiersey Clemons, Kiefer Sutherland

Release Date September 29th, 207 

Flatliners is a remarkably bad movie. I love Elliot Page; he is a very compelling and charismatic actor. Why has he been marginalized so much that he felt she needed to make this bizarrely dumb movie? What compelled him and the very talented director Niels Arden Oplev, director of the Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to think this movie was a good idea? Why did anyone think that remaking a movie as bad as the original Flatliners was a good idea? The Joel Schumaker directed 1990 Flatliners is a terrible movie and somehow this version manages to be worse than that. I’m baffled.

Flatliners stars Eliot Page as Courtney, a medical student who is plagued by the memory of the death of her younger sister in an accident that was her fault. Nine years after the accident Courtney has become consumed by the idea of knowing whether or not there is an afterlife where she might atone for her sin. Wanting to know about the afterlife she conceives of an experiment where she will have fellow med students stop her heart and let her die for a few minutes before bringing her back with the secrets of death.

Joining Courtney for the experiment is Sophia (Kiersey Clemons) and Jamie (James Norton) a trust fund kid who Courtney assumes is just reckless enough to go along with the plan. Dragged into the experiment are Ray (Diego Luna) and Marlo (Nina Dobrev) who jump in when Sophia and Jamie struggle to bring Courtney back to life. If you bought into the idea that Courtney might not come back after her first Flatline you might just be the audience for this movie. The complete lack of suspense in this scene doesn’t prevent lots of heavy breathing and forced tension.

Of course, Courtney must come back to life because her subsequent hallucinations are the source of most of the film’s jump scares. Courtney decides to keep the jump-scare-itis she contracted from flatlining to herself and when Jamie sees her thriving, answering difficult questions, relearning how to play the piano, as if her brain has been rewired by flatlining, he decides he must do it next. The film again must give us the forced fake tension of whether he’s going to come back or not. He does and then it’s party montage time because the last thing this movie needs is to do anything we can’t predict.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal