While the music is fun and Malek is good, the narrative is wildly inconsistent and builds up its characters horribly, making for one of the worst scripts of the year

Rating: 3/10 (2 February 2019)

While Malek tries to inject life into the film, it feels completely segmented and disjointed, as if the film pieced together 6 small parts of Mercury's life where characters were different people and didn't show development between any of the segments. And you can't even claim the plot is disjointed because they have to squeeze real life down into a simpler, short narrative because they took plenty of creative liberties.
The simple, fundamental problem is the terrible script. They manage to make a fascinating true story seem at points unrealistic and at others boring. The first act was the lowest point in the movie. It seems very hard to believe that Queen, one of the most legendary bands of all time, was formed by three guys in a going nowhere, not very driven bar band where their lead singer leaves them, and then someone watching who apparently had little musical experience joins them, and almost immediately and without challenges they rise to great stardom. The movie just glosses over and makes it seem easy and natural that these random, previously completely irrelevant local musicians become international superstars. The narrative in the first act was no conflict at all, led by Freddie and the others just support him and songs just magically flow out of them (the first session they have, they already have Killer Queen in their back pocket?!). The creation of Bohemian Rhapsody was especially absurd to the point of being laughable - all the lyrics and exceptionally complex rhythmic and tonal changes just come to him? No natural artistic challenges to work through and change things, especially for one of the most complex songs ever made? The lack of effort they ever have to put in to make great music felt like a disservice to artists.
The characters are very poorly developed throughout. The other 3 band members are completely indistinguishable and indistinct for the first half of the movie, and even after that they are completely flat characters with little personality. His relationship with Mary begins with no reason beyond he thinks she's pretty, and of course they immediately fall in love with no depth to their relationship. Why he chooses to marry her, and how Freddie's sexuality was dealt with in general, was perplexing and poorly explained. Had he never felt any attraction to men before marrying her, but then when going on tour we see his perspective to suddenly be bizarrely sexually charged?
Freddie's character more than any other suffered from the discretized narrative chunks. Early in the movie, he's a hardworking, scrappy guy who loves music and manages to get this band to take him, though he has an odd and flamboyant style. Then we see a jump to him being essential to the band and out of nowhere bringing them success. How he had the musical experience or talent to do this is unclear. Despite his individual and flamboyant style, during this period there is never a hint of conflict and he's clearly the leader. Then there's a jump from this unrealistic period of perfect harmony to an equally unexpected shift to Freddie being utterly self-absorbed and flippant towards the band. He lives it up, parties hard, and alienates the band. During this period, the reporters scene seemed out of place and jarring, as it showed very different emotional issues than were shown in the flamboyant party style surrounding it. It also implied a frustration that people only cared about Freddie's life and not the band or their music, which wasn't shown anywhere else.
And then we reach the only part of the movie that shows something that could be quite good, but of course they ruin it. A picture of Mercury as an uber-talented but self-absorbed person who pushes everyone away develops, and he seems destined to hit rock bottom. Paul could've been a fascinating antagonist in creating this spiral and pushing others out for his benefit only to ruin Freddie, but their relationship is horribly set up and never clear who holds power and investment in the other. The shift in Freddie trusting everything to Paul to turning on him by Mary's word was inconsistent, and then the ending redemption arc for Freddie made everything ring hollow and gave the movie an immoral message: Freddie rises on talent, only cares about himself and pushes others out, but then everyone loves him again because of one concert so his talent bails him out anyways. Not only is that arc not what actually happened (he didn't really push the band away), but it leaves a horrible message. There's an interesting story there, but they were too afraid to actually follow it (and it wouldn't be true to Freddie's story, raising the question of why they brought the arc in at all).
The music is perfectly acceptable, the Live Aid concert is good, and Malek does what he can to salvage the wreck. The humor often didn't land with me, but wasn't a key problem of the movie. As other reviewers put it, it does feel like an AI adapted a wikipedia page into a script, and the outcome isn't good. Who thinks this movie is one of the best of the year??? There are some decent individual scenes, mostly thanks to Malek, but the plot is riddled with holes and character inconsistencies, and aside from hearing good Queen songs, none of it really feels fun to watch.