Disappointing from start to finish

Rating: 3/10 (3 November 2018)

"Bohemian Rhapsody" had everything to be a great biopic. The story of singer Freddie Mercury is rich and different from many who lived in show business and at the time of the emergence of stadium mega-bands in the twentieth century. By itself is exotic a guy who was born in Zanzibar, Africa, spent his childhood in India and then was forced to immigrate to England because of a revolution in his country, began to study design and suddenly joins with a quasi dentist, a quasi-physicist and an almost mechanical engineer to set up a band that would be a hit-maker in the '70s and' 80s.
But "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a lazy film that does not deliver even the basics, which would be a facetious, linear biopic based on historical moments of the band and its vocalist. It is a superficial, erratic work that adds nothing new or relevant to the biography of Queen or Freddie himself, one of the great voices in rock history.
The film, for example, touches on important issues that deserved to be further explored. Ready a few: why is Freddie's relationship with the family so cold and filled gaps? How was your childhood in Zanzibar and India, where, by the way, did he start playing piano? What kind of influence could he have suffered from this life in these two places? In what family, immigration influenced him or not to be what he became? Why deny the name and origins? These are questions that could have been asked and were not answered. In the film, his family is almost a tip in history.
Freddie's own relationship with his homosexuality, as well as his internal conflicts, lack and solitude are not properly treated / harnessed to try to understand who Freddie was. In short, it's a very little-delivered movie.
Of course, the production suffered several problems. Initially, Freddie would be played by Sacha Baron Cohen, but divergences with guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor, ended up dynamiting their participation. The place ended up being occupied by Rami Malek, known for his participation in the TV series "Mr Robot", but delivering a Freddie just acceptable and nothing remarkable.
After that, Bryan Singer himself was fired from production with two weeks to go. Direction this one that fell in the lap of Dexter Fletcher. But the film ended up having the same face of Singer's later work, with little depth in approaching characters and work short of expectations. "X-Men: Apocalypse" (2016) is an example.
In fact, "Bohemian Rhapsody" only lends itself to Queen's good songs, especially those that represented turning points in the band's career - Bohemian Rhapsody, Love of My Life, We Will Rock You, I Want to break free "," We are the Champions "," Another one bites the dust "- to bring comfort to the heart of the viewer. It would have been more fruitful and cheaper, though, to listen to Queen's greatest hits on Spotify.
The screenplay by Anthony McCarten and Peter Morgan, who is responsible for such good films as "The Last King of Scotland" (2005), "The Queen" (2006), Frost / Nixon (2008) and "Rush" (2013) also sins by not providing basic information, putting Rock in Rio in a random time and space between 1975 and 1985 and creating bad dialogues. Nor does it seem that there was a band there creating great hits. And even these moments of creation of the musicians sound fake and soulless.
If Malek is far from striking, but does not compromise a gear that is flawed from beginning to end, the actors who make the other members of the band - always seen through the narrative with extreme generosity - are weak. Gwilym Lee (Brian May), Ben Hardy (Roger Taylor), Joseph Mazzello (John Deacon) is there to not compromise and be the sober pieces of Freddie Mercury's egotrip. Meanwhile, entrepreneur Paul Prenter (Allen Leech) is depicted as the villain in the film, responsible for the friction between Freddie and the rest of the band and even for his temporary separation.
So, "Bohemian Rhapsody" goes through its 2h15min owing a lot. His most memorable moments turn out to be Malek's scene in the rain, when Freddie decides to leave the bottom of the pit to resume his career with Queen and the historical presentation in 1985 Live Aid, a key point for the band and Freddie, in a context where the singer had just learned that he had AIDS, a disease that would eventually contribute to his death six years later. But unfortunately all of Queen's timeline in the movie does not even hit 70% of what actually happened. Just as the viewer leaves the cinema without even knowing the name of a disc of the band.
Singer, by the way, chose to put a fake Queen's pocket show inside the film to portray the performance at Live Aid. I do not know if that was the best option. It seemed like a lazy option to me. For it was not a movie or a real Queen show, bringing noises everywhere.
So "Bohemian Rhapsody" ends with the false feeling of coming out on top, when in fact it left more holes and a bit of entertainment in an absolutely expendable movie.