Bohemian Rhapsody meets Across the Universe

Rating: 3/10 (3 June 2019)

Before I start, let me get out the positives:
Acting- Taron Egerton gives a fantastic performance as Elton John. You can really see that he took this opportunity to play a legendary performer and gave it his all. You can see his passion throughout his entire performance. The other actors in the film are all fine, doing a really good job, none stood out as bad or not up to par.
Costumes- simply stunning. Captured Elton's eccentricity to a T, and the design overall was extremely pleasing.
Singing & Dancing- Taron is an extremely talented singer, and it really showcases in this. The choreography is also amazing, the dancing was great, no complaints there.
Now on to the negative.
Let me start this part off by saying I am an avid fan of musicals and musical theater. I absolutely adore them. But I have to say, for the first time maybe ever, the singing and musical numbers just didn't make sense to me, mostly because the lyrics had little to nothing to do with what was happening onscreen. Likely, was due to them not being written to be performed as a musical, and they were instead sort of stuck in whatever place in the story they might have worked best.
Another movie that did the same thing, but it worked for them was 2007's Across The Universe, which was written in a very similar fantastical style as Rocketman. The reason, though that those songs seemed to fit more into the story was that they were, many of them, sung by many different characters. Rocketman made the attempt to do that, but it was only for one or two songs, leaving the rest to just feel like the lyrics were just out of place. Had they gone further with that aspect, the film would have had much more of an impact as a musical, instead of being a half musical half biopic amalgamation.
The writing itself was good for the most part, but the characters were not particularly fleshed out, mostly Elton's parents. His mother throughout most of the film was extremely supportive of his career, until suddenly out of nowhere there was a confrontation between the two of her saying that he's the biggest disappointment. Likely this is due to his many addictions, but the film gave us no indication that she even knew about his addictions, much less how they may have affected her.
The character of John Reid also seemed fairly underdeveloped, and seemed to only be there to serve as a one dimensional villain. Granted, I know very little about Elton John's history, but as an audience member watching the film, I would have like to have seen more justification as to this man convinced Elton that he loved him. It just seemed to be "We've had sex twice, so now we're in love." And then five seconds later he's abusive.
As for the last seen in the film it seemed so incredibly forced.
The pacing in the film left much to be desired. Like Bohemian Rhapsody it has 20+ years to cover in only 2 hours, so I get that certain things must be adjusted for a storytelling purpose. But certain moments were barely used and then just thrown away without allowing it to sink in how they affected Elton. The biggest example of this in the film is his four year marriage to Renate Blauel, which is covered in about four minutes. Yes. Four minutes. And then is hardly mentioned again, without allowing us to really feel what Elton was feeling at the time.
Overall the movie was fine, but there were a LOT of missed opportunities that could have made it great.