Michael Proves Why You Shouldn’t Always Listen To Movie Critics

Trust critics to year apart a Hollywood biopic on an era-defining music artist, only for it to rake in millions at the box office, and even get an Oscar nomination or two. If anything, it might even win the nominations, just ask Bohemian Rhapsody. The latest target in the all too well known line of mass acclaim and critical dumpster fire is Antoine Fuqua’s Michael, a story about how the controversial King of Pop played to an uncanny resemblance by Michael Jackson’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson himself. 

And so the question “Is the movie any good?” ends up being an exercise of screaming out into a void that won’t scream back at you. Most biopics are a tribute to the legend of their subject. They are usually centered around musicians whose songs raised generations, so if you just promote the film well enough, you are already guaranteed to recover your production costs; the fanbase of the musician will show up, almost without fail. If anything, musical biopics have the highest return on investment among any other Hollywood genre, coming right after horror (now you know why we are still getting new Final Destination films even after all the loose ends have been tied up). 

And most of these fans attend the screening to relive the glory that was the subject. Because come on, everyone knows that a biopic is no documentary; if anything, the singers and their representatives have a lot of say in what is portrayed and what is conveniently cut off. Just look at the difference in how Elvis Presley is portrayed in Bas Luhrmann’s Elvis (where Presley’s family and the Elvis Estate were involved) and in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (where they weren’t).  

Then what is a good musical biopic? Does hearing all the most famous songs by your favourite singer suffice? Every movie seems to do that. Is it the physical resemblance? Turns out, it matters more when your singer is well known. Timothee Chalamet and Rami Malek’s looks as Bob Dylan and Freddie Mercury, respectively, are still widely debated. Diljit Dosanjh, on the other hand, looked nothing like Amar Singh Chamkila, yet the cosplay worked because outside Punjab, only a handful few knew what the original singer looked like. On the flip side, Bradley Cooper practically entered the uncanny valley with his over-reliance on prosthetics in Maestro. In that respect, you have to admit that Jaafar Jackson looks almost exactly like his uncle, and in a good way. 

I’ll not even ask about accuracy, because it’s a given that biopics have to play around with truth and fiction for dramatic effect. What about the plot? Everything seems to follow the same formula: our unknown star set to make it big, they get a chance to show their talent to the public, people are surprised at how good they are, fame follows, news heights are scaled, criticism and controversy ensues, and then our lead gets lost in the limelight, or makes a satisfying comeback. The most you can experiment is by adding a few scenes of magical realism as Dexter Fletcher did in Elton John’s Rocketman.

But what does matter, especially when it comes to a person as famous as Michael Jackson, is how well you can recreate the overall energy of the person (vibe, as they say nowadays). Will the audience feel for young Michael when his father terrorises his sons? Will they feel the charisma with which he swayed thousands in sold-out concerts? 

I was not born when Michael Jackson was at his peak. If anything, my earliest knowledge of him came from stories about his legendary status I heard from my parents and the jokes about him I saw on South Park and that one Eminem song. Will they be covered in the tentative second movie? Probably so, probably not. 

But for today, there are thousands who have seen Michael Jackson perform live or on their television screens, and many more who grew up watching the humongous catalogue of his music videos, interviews and concert clips; who would know every little mannerism that made Jackson who he was. And, probably because of this, a biopic like Michael comes down to how convincingly Jaafar Jackson plays the legend and how well he executes each dance move and sings the songs.

And how does Jaafar Jackson portray Michael? You can only understand the magnificence once you experience it yourself in theatres.