What’s it about?
It’s a Michael Jackson biopic, but not so much of a biopic that it stops being fun to watch
What’d we think?
There are two very important things to get out of the way before launching into this review. There is a legal doctrine called Right Of Publicity, which essentially boils down to the fact that any commercial use of an individual’s likeness requires the consent of their family (I’m hugely simplifying this for the sake of brevity, the website isn’t called Super Legally Accurate Reviews), and that I personally think biopics are a genre worthy of disdain. With that out of the way, I have to say that I really enjoyed this movie and was in the zone pretty much the entire time.
There were a few elements that could go either way in this film. Director Antione Fuqua was a coin flip – for every Training Day (2001) there was an Olympus Has Fallen (2013); but casting Jaafar Jackson (a non-actor, and nephew of Michael Jackson) in the lead role was something I saw as a roll of the dice. While Antoine’s coin might have landed on its edge, Jaafar Jackson has done a phenomenal job, embodying the King of Pop to such an extent that he ends up carrying the movie on his narrow shoulders. Not knowing what he usually looks like or sounds like meant that by the second nose job I was just watching Michael. I’m sure that as more time passes and the magic wears off, I’ll be more critical, but for almost all of the movie’s runtime I was wholly committed to the ride.
The necessity of family approval means that the movie presents a fairly mild version of Michael’s abuse at the hands of Joe Jackson (Colman Domingo, who is so good at his job that he’s at risk of getting typecast as a horrible bloke), and stops well short of Michael’s own abuse allegations. In that context, it’s as good as you’re going to get. Die-hard fans of the family drama would have already got their fix from 1992’s The Jacksons: An American Dream and everyone else is likely to let it slide. The hill that I’m willing to die on is the fact that we jump to Michael in the studio with Quincy Jackson in 1978 without ever addressing the fact that they met during production of The Wiz.
Let’s quickly visit Sidney Lumet’s run in the late 70s. He directed Dog Day Afternoon in 1975 (trans rights before it was trendy, RIP John Cazale), Network in 1976 (skewering influencer culture before it existed), Equus in 1977 (as uncomfortable as a theatrical adaptation about blinding horses can get), and then in 1978 he directed The Wiz – a Harlem-as-Kansas adaptation of The Wizard of Oz that isn’t “so bad it’s good”, but so bad that it should be studied in film school. The point of this medium-winded sidebar is that Michael Jackson made his acting debut as The Scarecrow in this agricultural-exhibition-port-a-loo of a movie, which is how he met Quincy Jones, who was adapting the original music for the screen. Michael tries to play it coy and hopes we’ll believe that these two cultural giants met in some less horrific setting, but they skip right by it and expect us not to notice.
I enjoyed Michael. It’s a really pleasant pop show of a movie, just don’t expect anything terribly incisive and enjoy the closest thing you’ll get to seeing the man on stage.
Oh, before I forget – the movie ends normally enough, and then hits you with a closing line that teases a second movie. Given the fact that there’s zero chance the Jackson family will sign off on anything even remotely spicy, this feels like a joke that I’d make about how the movie would end.
JOE JACKSON WILL RETURN IN AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY
