November 2, 2018 3 min to read

Bohemian Rhapsody

Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t do much right - but Malek as Mercury is worth the price of admission, albeit barely...

by Zach Saul

What a colossal waste of Rami Malek’s talent Bohemian Rhapsody was. Not all 133 minutes of the movie are a flaming trainwreck, but enough of them are that Queen fans should feel outraged at what could have been. The first 45 minutes of Bohemian Rhapsody are borderline cinematic malpractice, and were excruciating to sit through. These sequences demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of the musician/artist that was too egregious to ignore.

Disappointingly, Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t have anything to say about the “rise” of Queen - which took place in the span of two jump cuts and about 30 seconds of film. We see Mercury singing to the members of “smile” in a parking lot, then see him shaking a tambourine around onstage before “Queen” makes it big. Without understanding how the relationships inside the band or the music itself contributed to their rise, it’s hard to feel connected to any of the characters - and credit Rami Malek who managed to connect with the audience despite the movies manny shortcomings.

Over and over again in Bohemian Rhapsody the scenes that should’ve be most fun aren’t fun at all - and delivered the most boring, cliched version of a band milestone. For example, in a particularly cringeworthy scene we see keyboardist Brian May (this sequence is also featured in the trailer) declare the band needs to get experimental and then see them jingling coins on the drumset and swinging an amplifier suspended by a cable it across the studio. What’s so irritating about that scene isn’t that bands wouldn’t horse around in the studio, they surely do. However, directors (Bohemian Rhapsody fired director Bryan Singer mid-way through production and had to have Dexter Fletcher finish the movie) Dexter Fletcher and Brian Singer are demonstrating they haven’t a clue in the world what musical experimentation is, and aren’t going to waste a second of film exploring it.

The film’s “climax” happens at Live Aid made would make sense if the first 90 minutes had spent time connecting to charitable themes, or confronting the AIDS epidemic, but sadly Singer/Fletcher do neither. The ending instead feels like a patchwork repair, torn out of a nicely made documentary and stuck onto the end of a band biopic nobody will remember.

The Good: The romance and lasting tension between Mercury and Mary Austin is surprisingly textured. Malek’s longing, admiration, and loneliness are palpable. Freddy’s love for Mary Austin was as earnest as it gets, and when she looks back at him to say “what makes it even worse is that it’s not your fault” (after he admits to being gay) my heart sank for the impossible choice she was forced to make. I believed Boynton’s mixture of anger, jealousy and compassion completely and wish the movie spent two hours on Freddy and Mary’s relationship instead of the doctored story of queen’s world tour. On a lighter note, Freddy’s cats deliver phenomenal performances in Bohemian Rhapsody and prevented me from throwing things on more than one occasion.

The Bad: It’s common practice for biopics to doctor history and embellish the details of a real life stories but the inaccuracies in Bohemian Rhapsody are a bit much. Most notably the band never broke up in real life - and Mercury wasn’t diagnosed with AIDS until after the Live Aid show, which explains the movie’s ending feeling as forced as it did.