Bohemian Rhapsody
I grew up on the music of Queen, loving how they could achieve a massive range of styles while still sounding completely singular, and I also lived in a household that acknowledged Freddie Mercury as the greatest lead vocalist of all time. Naturally, I was curious about the life of Mercury, and when I heard they were making a movie about him starring Sacha Baron Cohen, I was pretty excited. Then the project kept changing due to the band's own creative vision and eventually (about 8 years later) a trailer was released. The trailer was pretty solid, but I wasn't quite sold. Then the reviews came in and it became clear that the movie was just okay and I didn't need to see it. Then the movie was released to the public and became a huge hit. Then it won Best Drama at the Golden Globes. Then it got nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Now I had to see it.
These are my thoughts on the film. Spoilers for a (kinda sorta) true story:
First of all, I don't care about any of the characters. Any good biopic (think The Social Network, Goodfellas, Ed Wood, Amadeus, Raging Bull, Patton, The Wolf of Wall Street, etc.) starts by introducing the important players of the story. A good screenwriter shouldn't assume the audience knows who these real-life people are already, instead they should establish them as if they're made-up characters in a fictional story, because the fact is: It's still a movie. The Social Network introduces Mark Zuckerberg as a computer prodigy who has terrible social skills, Ed Wood shows Ed Wood as a director with big dreams and a great work ethic but absolutely no talent, and Goodfellas stars Henry Hill as a working class kid who finds a family in the mafia. These are interesting characters, who happen to be based on people that really exist. Because if I just wanted information about the life of a real person, I'd go to Wikipedia. I don't need the film version of Freddie Mercury's Wikipedia page, but that's essentially what I got.
If someone who knew nothing about Queen watched Bohemian Rhapsody, they would probably be very confused. The characters suddenly appear without having any discerning, unique traits that would make them memorable at all. Freddie Mercury (according to Bohemian Rhapsody) is good at singing but his parents want him to be a doctor or a lawyer instead. That's about as boring and cliche as any story can get. Monty Python was parodying that cliche in the 1960s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkihKpnx5yM), which was over 50 years ago from today, and 10 years before the events in Bohemian Rhapsody took place. I understand that life is full of cliches, and the screenwriter can't help that that's how Mercury's parents really felt, but that's why they should've taken a more innovative approach to the story. In Goodfellas Henry Hill's parents don't approve of him joining the mafia, but that's why they're not the focus of the movie and have maybe 5 minutes of screen time. In Bohemian Rhapsody, the parents are a huge focus of the movie despite not being remotely interesting at all. It's a tired old story that we've seen a million times.
Other notable cliches in Bohemian Rhapsody include:
1) Playing an already fully-formed version of a song for the first time and saying they're just "trying it out", as if it's their first thought and it took no effort to craft the song. (Case and point, the "We Will Rock You" scene, which is the perfect example of everything I hate about bad biopics.)
2) Freddie Mercury coughs into a tissue. There's blood. He hides it. This is the first thing most people think of when they think of cliches, and this movie did it.
3) Queen "wins" every single scene they're in. They're always in the right no matter what. Considering how involved the band was in the creative process of the film, this feels downright masturbatory.
4) Freddie asks to be in the band, they say no, so he immediately sings to them. I can't imagine that's how that really happened, and even if it is, the tone of the scene feels fake.
5) They play a perfect version of "Keep Yourself Alive" at their very first show, where Freddie Mercury also discovers his signature broke-off mic. Mercury also apparently had "Bohemian Rhapsody" in his head since day one. All of this comes off as false and it's insulting that they think anyone would buy it.
6) At one point Freddie Mercury says to Queen "We're all outcasts.", which is not only a cliche but also completely untrue in terms of how they're all presented in the movie. They're never shown to be outcasts or even particularly disliked by anyone.
7) Mike Myers plays a studio head and references teenagers banging their heads to "Bohemian Rhapsody." Anyone who's seen Wayne's World understands this horribly forced reference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thyJOnasHVE), and it's a great example of the cliche where the fourth wall is purposefully broken to reference something that happens after the events of the movie take place. There's a great Patton Oswalt bit about this phenomenon (check out "Your Moment of Irony" on his album Feelin' Kinda Patton), and I cringe every time a movie or show does it.
8) Freddie Mercury sexually harasses a waiter, but luckily he's into it and becomes Freddie's boyfriend. It's almost like Bryan Singer made this movie.
9) The entire break-up scene between Freddie Mercury and his girlfriend is paint-by-numbers, and uncreatively soundtracked to "Love of My Life."
10) Freddie Mercury delivers the news that he has AIDS to the band as a fun surprise. The actual transcript of the scene is: Mercury: "I've got it." John Deacon: "What?" Mercury: "AIDS." I'm not kidding.
If the cliches aren't enough, the story itself is somehow rushed and lazily written despite being over 2 hours long. It almost feels like the screenwriter just wanted to get the project over with as soon as possible, like me in college writing an essay the morning it's due. The whole movie feels like a very long trailer, except the Bohemian Rhapsody trailer is much better than the actual movie. It's like a sketch show parody of itself in that it hits all of the same story beats and uses the same disingenuous dialogue that every bad biopic uses, except it doesn't take the extra step to satirize bad biopics, instead it just is one. The episode of South Park where the kids play Guitar Hero is a perfect send-up of these bad rock band biopics, and it still manages to give the story more emotional gravitas in 22 minutes than the entirety of Bohemian Rhapsody. And that was a parody on purpose.
Bad writing aside, even the visuals are atrocious. Everything is overly lit and looks false. It's even worse when it's trying to be artistic, like the scene where Freddie Mercury talks to the press while he's on drugs and it looks like a Spy Kids movie. Even the big spectacle moments, which Bryan Singer has plenty of experience directing, look fake. For instance, the CGI Live Aid concert audience at the end of the movie looks like a video game from the 90's. Could they seriously not fill a stadium with the simple ad: "Hey, we're doing a Queen biopic. Come see a free concert and be in a movie."? Apparently not, because instead they just keep cutting between the animated crowd and the ten extras they hired. It's embarrassing.
It's shocking that in today's times Bryan Singer's allowed to make movies, let alone terrible ones, and this terrible one won Best Drama at the Golden Globes and got nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Apparently this was due to it having an aggressive Oscar campaign, something the Weinsteins were also notorious for, which completes the Bryan Singer-Harvey Weinstein Venn Diagram. This was a bad year for movies, but not bad enough to nominate Bohemian Rhapsody, and the only reason it did well in the box office was because people love the music of Queen and wanted to find out more about them as people, which they didn't get because the writing was so lazy that none of the characters felt like real people, despite them being based on actual real people. There's also plenty of factual inaccuracies, but that's honestly the least of its problems. What's far worse is that it's a poorly made film that squanders a perfectly interesting subject. Sacha Baron Cohen had the idea of having the movie be about Queen after the death of Freddie Mercury. Now that's an interesting idea. No wonder he left the project.
Don't waste your time with this movie. Especially if you're a Queen fan.
