A marshmallow sandwich between two slices of white bread

Rating: 3/10 (31 January 2019)

Mythical heroes are hard to make movies about, especially rock 'n' roll stars. After all, how can a wild, prolific celebrity like Freddie Mercury possibly be brought down to Earth with the rest of us?
"Bohemian Rhapsody" tries to humanize him, and it affords Rami Malek plenty of showboating in the role. If for nothing else, it's a movie that's in love with its subject. The rags-to-razzmatazz Queen biopic worships the ground Freddie walks on with a devotion that borders on fetishistic. Hell, sometimes it just makes Freddie into Rock 'N' Roll Jesus. (A pivotal scene in the third act finds Freddie confiding a secret to his bandmates inside a church, as if they're his feather duster-haired disciples.)
The original director, the troubling Bryan Singer, abruptly left the project, and how much of the film he completed before dropping out is unclear. Yet his fingerprints are all over "Bohemian Rhapsody." The concert scenes - and it feels like there are hundreds - have all the coldness, sterility and grandiloquence of one of his "X-Men" films. Like the rest of the movie, they're edited within an inch of their lives and too often confuse blinding backlights for dramatic heft.
The movie tracks Freddie's rise, as well as the band's, in a blurry, relentless cavalcade of dramatic arguments and shows. Freddie, in his 20s and with a garish fashion sense, yearns to break into the music world, and he meets his would-be bandmates (Gwilym Lee and Ben Hardy) outside a pub. They need a lead singer, he wants the gig, and one hour and many montages later, they've added a bassist (Joseph Mazzello) and recorded four albums, and Freddie's realized he's bisexual.
All that hurried hullabaloo envelops a blustery record producer (Mike Myers), a serpentine manager (Aidan Gillen), and Freddie's romance with Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton). Boynton is underutilized in the film, but so is everyone. The other members of Queen have zero personality apart from their tremendous wigs - their interchangeability is a bit like those homogenous dwarves in The Hobbit series.
Yet the film's larger problem lies in its failure to find deeper substance to the band and their continued popularity. Queen, an ordinary band with an extraordinary lead singer, has been turned into a myth on par with more interesting musicians like Elvis Presley and The Beatles. They've been the basis for a wildly successful blockbuster stage musical, "We Will Rock You," and everything from "Guitar Hero" to "A Knight's Tale" has cashed in on their legacy. They feel less like a band than a product, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" happily hawks said product at sixteen bucks a ticket.
The movie jitters between subjects, sometimes examining Freddie's sexuality or raucous personal life, sometimes looking at the band's musical process, but never marrying these focuses together into anything coherent. This rote structure recalls Freddie's own opposition in the film: "I'm tired of touring," aren't you?" he says to the band. "Album, tour, album, tour. I'm sick of it."
That Malek manages to act through his ridiculous prosthetic teeth is the film's biggest achievement. But his peacocking and hip-gyrating only thrust skin-deep. Malek, like his other talented colleagues, never gets to play a human being. Nobody in "Bohemian Rhapsody," least of all Freddie, wants anything, has any goals. Malek simultaneously brings something liberated and something robotic to the role, as if every step, every tilt of the head, had been carefully choreographed weeks before shooting.
And yet, despite the film's litany of problems, there were moments I was drawn into the action. Some of the quieter, slower scenes gripped me, and for all its playing fast-and-loose with the band's history, I left "Bohemian Rhapsody" feeling that it's largely harmless. It doesn't bring any of the subtlety or emotion to Queen that, say, "Love & Mercy" did for Brian Wilson, but "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a comfort film first and foremost, a marshmallow sandwich between two slices of white bread. Surely (and hopefully) there will be better movies about Queen, but few, if any, of them will have performances as virtuosic as Malek's.