Awful Sacrifice of a Film

Rating: 1/10 (4 June 2019)

You don't have to be an Elton John fan or vice-versa, to watch this film and come out of the theater with the feeling of "who cares", since Rocketman is that kind of 2 hour waste of ones life in a film that hardly anybody will remember a few weeks after watching. But why am I being so harsh, you might say? Well, for one, this is unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, a very emotionally drained film, with really poor acting performances from leads.
Taron Egerton tries hard to play a confused and impressionable Elton, yet his performances fall flat, as we never really feel we are invested in his problems, and in fact come to find him rather annoying by the end of the film. Yet the award for poor performance must go to Bryce Dallas Howard, whose clumsy effort to speak cockney and her wooden acting leave one with the sense that she was reading off a page held in front of her, off camera! In fact every scene she appears in goes from bad to worse, and together with Taron, the critical relationship between mother and son falls flat emotionally.
The other aspect that really makes a mockery of this film is the very premise, as it seems to be a pale copy of Bohemian Rhapsody, with every shift in the narrative being a poor carbon copy of that superior film. This is not a surprise as it was Dexter Fletcher who came aboard Bohemian Rhapsody when Bryan Singer left the film, so similarities abound, yet where Bohemian Rhapsody was actually emotionally invested, this is just a 'meh' film that ends with us less sympathetic to Elton John than when we began the journey.