Bohemian Rhapsody is a film that excels in mediocrity.

Rating: 1/10 (15 November 2018)

With a lack of substance in tandem with a stale presentation, this film left me bored and pissed off. Simply put Bohemian Rhapsody is the worst film I have seen all year and left me not only wanting to see Sacha Baron Cohen's Queen film but literally any other director take the helm but the utterly incompetent Bryan Singer.
Bohemian Rhapsody is a film that depicts the story of Queen and primarily Freddie Mercury, from the origins of the band all the way to their performance at Live Aid in 1985. It shows many of the band most iconic moments like their global tours and the creation of of the titular song Bohemian Rhapsody. It attempts to show the dynamic of the members, the rise and eventual fall of the band. I say attempt intentionally because in my opinion this film fundamentally fails at building any form of compelling narrative. Firstly I want to point out two things, I am not the final judge on whether this film does justice to Queen or justice to Freddie Mercury. I don't know the band personally and I'm not informed enough on the story to make that decision. I also wanted to say that I have heard various reports on how inaccurate the film is and whatnot . I am not in tune enough with the story to know how severe these inaccuracies are and personally I have no issue with a film creating creative liberties to improve itself.
A biopic should be more interesting than the story it is trying to tell already is. Take for example First Man, this biopic of Neil Armstrong is true to life certainly but you also get a grasp of who Armstrong was, visually the film is stunning and the characters and script is well written and entertaining. This gives me a reason to watch the film rather than just read the Wikipedia page. The same cannot be said for Bohemian Rhapsody which I honestly just found boring. There are many reasons as to why it is boring but it mostly comes down to the pacing for me. The film is way too long and is tortuously boring. There is long segments where very little happens and as it trudged along at a snails pace I could only marvel at how little substance was stretched out to a two hour film. Not only is this film severely lacking in much quantity but also in any form of general artistic direction. It constantly feels pointless and as though it doesn't even know what it's building towards. This creates what I feel is the real issue of the film, the fact that it's just not entertaining. It is merely fun in the sense that you can look at bright colours and listen to Queen music for two hours.
I really was hoping that Rami Malek would ,perhaps not save this film, but at least pull it up a bit and I don't think he necessarily did a bad job, I thought his mannerisms and voice inflections were masterfully performed. However I think Malek couldn't really give it his all with the script he had. I had a major issue with the script and I saw vividly how far it dragged the film down. I am not entirely sure if the film uses real dialogue from the band or not but it all sounded incredibly over dramatic and overtly simply written. For a film that had real people to base itself on, it really cannot create compelling or fun characters. Now I'm not the verdict on whether these characters are true to life or not however I do think they are vitally flawed and miss a lot of the steps in character based narrative. An amazing example of this is Brian May who in the film serves no other purpose other than he was actually there in real life, after two hours I still have no clearer image of who this character is or what significance he has in the story other than playing guitar. The most perplexing part about this is that this is a common theme for every single character. I was astounded to find absolutely no well written or interesting characters. This is particularly surprising when it comes to the larger than life Freddie who is written off as simply cartoonish. Firstly it does not help that all the character speak in simplistic dialogue that is only ever funny or openly only existent to move the plot along. Although the plot does focus around Freddie, I never really felt as though his character was being really developed or explored. The film always feels more like it's just moving along his life like a slideshow.
Overall this film is just lazy and does whatever it can to ensure it draws in as much money as possible while still remaining "fun" and "eccentric". For example, the film has no original score, it only plays Queen music. I understand why some people may be confused as to why I want to bring this up, why it is such a big deal. The reason why I think it's so distracting is because it means that throughout the film either the music hasn't been matched to the scene properly because they desperately want to play a Queen song or the scene is oddly quiet because they couldn't find a Queen song to match it. I'm not suggesting the film ditches the Queen soundtrack altogether but it still should use some form of backing track to fill in scenes and compliment the film on a smaller scale. I have various other nitpicks to this degree. All of the scenes with Freddie singing are really distracting because it is clear that Rami Malek is not singing. Now I have no issue with him not singing but the film shows close ups of his face during concert scenes and doesn't even attempt to mask that it's not Rami Malek singing. I've seen a lot of people talking about how the ending is fantastically shot and it feels like you're actually at the Live Aid concert and I absolutely disagree. I felt the CGI was terrible and made it feel incredibly plastic and false and the cinematography was barely mediocre and showed nothing new or special. I also feel that during this scene and other concerts, the songs are cut off at quite odd times that ruin the scenes pacing. Overall this makes the concert scenes an odd mash up of weirdly edited music and false looking CGI where it has no place being.
I definitely think there is potential in the Queen story, I think there are incredibly eccentric and compelling characters to be shown and there is potential for an epic story of the rise and fall of these titans. However even though given all of this on a silver platter Bryan Singer fell flat on his face and made a boring drag of a film. I understand some people say the film is just trying to be fun. Firstly the heavy dramatization and characterization of Freddie (albeit an incredibly basic one) shows it is trying to be somewhat a serious drama. Even if I am just wrong and am "reading too much into it" and it is in fact just a fun Queen film, it failed as it is drawn out and boring. The film isn't exactly shockingly terrible in terms of cinematography it is mediocre, however due to the extreme lack of substance and poor pacing this standardized cinematography does nothing to make the film anything more than abismal. The flashy advertising and idea of this film may coerce you into seeing it but it is honestly the worst film I have seen all year and not worth your money. This absolutely incompetent film offers nothing more than only the information of the band matched with a Queen soundtrack and some flashy colours behind it.