Disappointing and often boring film about Freddie Mercury.

Rating: 6/10 (19 November 2018)

Queen is a guilty pleasure of mine. I'm more of a Beatles/Rolling Stones/Doors/Led Zeppelin type but Queen is one of the most entertaining groups to come down the pike. They employed many genres in their music such as glam, disco, opera, gospel, rockabilly and straight-ahead rock and were led by the often imitated, never duplicated Freddie Mercury. I was very interested in seeing Bohemian Rhapsody and, well, it was a disappointment.
I don't know why the producers chose to create a sanitized film about the life of Freddie. Many of us know that Freddie was a very private man who didn't grant many interviews and disliked the press infringing on his matters. Outside of his music and concerts. we know very little about him. So, they chose to use creative license to make up stuff, rearrange history and distort his life. As expected from a PG-13 film we get uninspiring dialogue, Freddie's homosexuality being trivialized (and made to be seen as harmful) and Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon relegated to being meaningless fringe characters.
Much of the movie, when not re-enacting concerts or recordings, is focused on Freddie's personal and emotional battle between his heterosexual love for Mary Austin and his homosexual love for Paul Prenter, who is ridiculously portrayed as a villain. His relationship with his real-life boyfriend Jim Hutton is barely acknowledged. Utter claptrap that wasn't needed and slows down the film to a crawl.
To be fair, the concert footage (especially Live-Aid) is superb and Rami Malek delivers a masterful performance as Mercury. He deserves a Golden Globe or Academy Award nomination as it's nothing short of brilliant. 5 of my stars go to him.
If you're a fan of Queen, yes, you should go to the theater and see this movie just for Malek's unreal performance as Freddie but don't expect much more out of the film. It's a wasted opportunity to learn about one of the greatest showmen in rock music history.