A lot of hits for QUEEN

Rating: 7/10 (27 May 2019)

Any movie with this much QUEEN music for the soundtrack is going to be entertaining. I didn't know much about Freddie's personal life going into this. I didn't know he was Indian Parsi was or that he had four extra incisors or why he carried a broken microphone stand. I didn't know much about his relationships. It was interesting to watch and learn a little more about Freddie and the band. At the same time a lot of his life felt glossed over and I feel this movie might have been better as a miniseries. I had to spend some time on Wikipedia after watching to get the facts of what really happened.
The basic formula was Freddie goes through some personal event, band gets together and makes up a new song, performance of new song, band gets more popular, Freddie goes through some personal stuff, band gets together to make a new song, more popular... A few twists and turns here and there but it's not much variety. What can you expect from a band since that is their life? The imitation is almost good as good as reality, just watch live Queen performances. The bassist and guitarist are spot on lookalikes. Freddie definitely has the most unique features of them all but Rami Malek captured his personality and flair during performances excellently. I've watched Mr. Robot a few times and Malek's voice doesn't seem to be dynamic enough to capture Freddie's speech as I was catching a lot of Elliott in his performance of Freddie. It would have been interesting to see how Sacha Baron Cohen would have played Freddie as he definitely looks more like Freddie to me. The live performances are entertaining and very well done. Yeah, it's lip-syncing live performances that are already out there, but still entertaining. I do wish they could have incorporated real footage of the live performances in with the acted version, because Freddie is such a larger than life performer that you just have to see him in real life.
Overall, being a casual fan of QUEEN, this was an entertaining way to learn more about the band and re-experience some of their greatest hits. I'll definitely be listening to them again the next few days.