Alongside superhero fare and the annual dive into Disney’s back catalogue for that year’s live-action remake, pop biopics have become a faithful part of any year’s cinema releases over the past decade.
From Bohemian Rhapsody to Rocketman, A Complete Unknown to Elvis, Hollywood seems to be whittling down their list of superstars, ensuring that just about everyone gets their time in the limelight…again.
Even The Beatles have a return in the works, with not just one film, but a four-part cinematic event from director Sam Mendes set to release in 2028. With that history in mind, it’s rather surprising that it’s taken this long to lure the long-gone King of Pop off of his Neverland ranch for a biopic of his own (all my love to Springsteen, but you’d think Jackson would take precedent). Or, rather, it’s surprising until you stop to think about it for a minute.
Whether you love him or loathe him, Michael Jackson’s legacy has become ingrained with pop culture (let alone pop’s culture) forever, his influence ricocheting even now, nearly twenty years after his death. The good, the bad and the downright strange, it’s all left its mark, and it’s no wonder that few directors have tried to approach and interpret the wholly unique cocktail of his life when weighing out their options for a new project. I’m no director – my filmmaking history is limited to a few embarrassing YouTube flicks shot in the early 2010s now living in exile in the grisly depths of the site’s unlisted section – but even if I were, I wouldn’t have touched this with a barge pole.
It proved extremely telling, then, when we all found out that Michael was only being made with heavy influence from his family and estate, a caveat that seemed to mark the death knell for any kind of exploration into the man’s dark side.
‘You are confident. You are strong. You are beautiful. You are the greatest of all time’
While there’s been a lot said about past iterations of the project possibly shining some light on Jackson’s obvious controversies (the film’s third act reportedly had to be completely reshot and rewritten to wipe the record clear of any and all mention of one victim), I feel there’s only so much interest one can take in the history behind any production before you have to cast such rumours aside and focus on what is (or rather, what isn’t) in the final picture.
Development is one thing; the finished product another, and of the two, the film itself is what lives on to be seen by great swathes of people who only have those two hours to go off of. As such, regardless of any prior intentions on the part of the creative team, Michael is an experience in which any idea or mere possibility of wrongdoing is entirely, eerily absent.
The film isn’t the slightest bit interested in exploring that whole underbelly of Jackson’s story at all, instead wholly focused on the shiny sheen of his life as a pop superstar, complete with a tragic backstory to boot.
Colman Domingo co-stars as Joe Jackson, the historically abusive father of the Five. Opposite Michael (played by MJ’s real life nephew, Jafar Jackson, in his first acting role), he is written in cartoonishly villainous fashion, whether he’s outright beating his sons or twirling his bushy moustache while sowing the seeds of his next machination.
Domingo certainly commits to the characterisation, but the drama gets old well before the film’s two-hour runtime comes to a close, blissfully disappearing for a while before once again rearing its ugly head for the final movement.
The marketing push seems eager to hide this, but it’s worth noting that Michael only delves into half of the Jackson story, cutting off in London, 1988 at the height of his Bad tour. As with something like Dune before it, the film has been written with a sequel in mind, box office results pending. This first part is less a holistic story of Michael’s career, more a tale of a caged bird set free.
Granted, I can see the thought behind the parental abuse plot as a through-line – there’s so much to tell that even with the film’s over-reliance on hefty time jumps (we cover twenty-two years in two hours), massive parts of the story are left missing or unaddressed completely. However, given everything else that is left unsaid about just how detrimental an effect such treatment may have had on Michael’s psyche, the entire storyline feels hollow.
It’s as if the family all got together, took a vote and ruled that the abuse storyline would become the core of the entire first film as a means of obfuscating Michael’s own allegations, which would surely come into the critical conversation. With that decision, the family feel as though they’re throwing a bone to us, as if the exploration of this corrupt father figure negates any need to discuss any of the other dubious parts of the tale. Joe Jackson was a notoriously bad father – we’ve known that for a good while – so he’s an easy choice for the chopping block, but focusing any and all criticism on him feels rather cowardly.
While I went into the screening with some trepidation, I was quite surprised by how uncomfortable I felt while watching Michael. It gets off to something close to a good start introducing us to a young MJ (his child self is played rather charmingly by Juliano Valdi) and taking us on a whistle-stop tour of the Jackson Five’s rise to fame that seems to serve as the zippy (if rather perfunctory) prologue to the greater story. The rot really begins to set in when we flash forward to an adult Michael and realise that the entire movie intends to operate at this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pace, with a scattershot, selective approach that seems to want to say a little about a lot. For a film supposedly detailing the ins and outs of his career, so much of what you’d expect to see in a MJ biopic has been eschewed for time.
As a result of that pacing decision, all sorts of elements of his life are battling for their literal minute in the limelight, and there have been some baffling choices made when it comes to screen time. I was a big MJ fan when I was younger and I can remember always rather liking Human Nature, but it’s an odd that that song seems to get more of a look-in here than Thriller. Similarly, rather than allowing us into the room for the infamous Van Halen feature on the guitar solo for Beat It, that song’s representation is instead relegated to a skin-crawlingly saccharine scene in which Michael seemingly ends all gang violence over the course of one dance number.
It would be one thing if Michael was a competent and engrossing biopic, its ideas succinct and well-executed. The lack of deeper deconstruction would remain an issue, but the film would still have some base level of enjoyment to it. Unfortunately, it fails even on that level. As a popcorn biopic of Jackson’s life, one that paints him out to be a grand and momentous character, it fails to give you the scenes and moments and sense of narrative that you’ve paid to see. With all the time-hopping, it’s hard to feel a connection with the story at hand, here – whenever I came close to that, we would jump forward another three or so years and rejoin a wholly different Michael at a different point in his life entirely.
Similarly, as the first part of a two-film story, the story stops well before we get enough, and the last-minute switch-up of the third act midway through the development process makes itself known with an ending that feels shoddily, hastily put together. We’ve had a few of these two-part film ‘events’ hit cinemas in the last few years. I already mentioned Dune, but Wicked comes to mind, too. While both of those IPs felt built from the ground up with the full intention of leading into a second part, this really doesn’t feel like the grand beginning of something bigger. Bafflingly, it neither demands a sequel nor satisfies as its own standalone film, instead landing in some uncanny valley in the middle.
The film’s unshakable sense of uncanny unease kills the experience dead. I’ve seen films that make far less sense than Michael (even with its brisk narrative). I’ve seen films with far worse production values, direction and acting (Jafar Jackson acquits himself quite well, bringing everything that the role requires of him) but I struggle to think of another film that made me feel quite so guilty for having bought a ticket, even for the sake of reviewing it.
The idea that the way to approach the difficult subject of Jackson’s life is to sanitise it completely not only feels insulting for anyone who’s ever heard of him as a performer (his reputation is writ large) but genuinely dubious at best from an ethical standpoint.
It’s no real surprise that the film doesn’t take him to task at all – given the backing of the family, that was always going to be the case – but the lengths that the film goes to to rewrite the narrative and deify its central character had me literally gagging in the cinema. It is a two-hour advert for an extremely problematic and controversial character and its James Bond-style ‘His story continues…’ card in the end credits feels like an eerie threat of further propaganda yet to come.
BBFC: Rated 12A for moderate threat, domestic abuse.
Michael is in cinemas now.
