Some good, but too much bad

Rating: 5/10 (27 November 2018)

It's not Rami Malek's fault. Let's make that clear. He comes through with a fittingly outrageous performance and should be commended, especially considering all the mistakes taking place around him. His prosthetic teeth are cartoonish, but he pulls them off just fine. He also pulls off the voice, the posture and the curious wandering eyes that that make manifest his burgeoning sexuality that slowly becomes clear to him.
'Bohemian Rhapsody' the movie's greatest problem is that there is no clear message or meaning. It's intentionally eclectic and mixed, but this concept works much better for the song than it does for the feature film. It never quite reveals what it's meant to say. If it only meant to pay cutesy fan service to the adoring Freddie Mercury and Queen fans of the world, then it's a job well done. If it meant to offer any other sort of statement about sexual expression or friendship or the creation of music, then it's mostly a miss.
The movie's greatest failure is its insistence on submitting constant winking in-jokes about Queen. When Mike Myers' music executive character says that no one will ever sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody while riding in a car, we all chuckle. Or, at least, we're supposed to. The crowd around me certainly did, but I just rolled my eyes. Moments like are not as clever as the filmmakers believe them to be.
The other greatest failures come from an inability to make moments believable. The lip syncing could be overlooked (even though it's awful) because no actor can reasonably be expected to make that perfect, but it's the director's issue for not choosing alternate angles to hide the mouths. Worse than the lip syncing is Freddie's relationship with his father. Dad is a classic conservative who disapproves of Freddie's lifestyle (the singing more so than the homosexuality, we're led to believe), and that's the entirety of their relationship until the cringeworthy resolution near the end. It's not even worthy of being considered manipulative because it's so weakly executed.
Another thing: did Freddie really not know he was gay until Queen had been a smashing success for years? Everyone else seemed to know and accept it. That seemed to be a bizarre choice of the writers.
If you love the music and absolutely adore Queen, you'll probably like this movie. But if you look to poke any holes at all in film itself, you'll spring a few dozen leaks. Freddie deserved better than this.