Review: Bohemian Rhapsody

The story of Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) and rock band Queen, whose other members include Brian May (Gwilym Lee), Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy), and bassist John Deacon (Joe Mazzello). Lucy Boynton plays Freddie’s female companion Mary, though he is quite clearly more sexually drawn towards men. Allen Leech plays the treacherously depicted Paul Prenter, whilst Aiden Gillen plays manager John Reid.

If you’re a Queen fan like I am, it’s unlikely I think that you’ll enjoy this 2018 film from director Bryan Singer (who still hasn’t bested his debut “The Usual Suspects”), with an uncredited assist by Dexter Fletcher (who will forever be Spike on “Press Gang” to me. Loved that show as a kid) after Singer’s dismissal. If you’re a movie fan with even the slightest critical eye, you’ll also be unlikely to enjoy the film. This is a wildly unconvincing biopic of Freddie Mercury, and an extremely shoddy piece of filmmaking to boot. How it has received any critical and commercial success, let alone how an embarrassingly miscast Rami Malek could go on to win a Best Actor award at the Oscars for poorly playing Freddie Mercury is beyond me. Even worse is how Singer’s favourite editor-composer John Ottman (“The Usual Suspects”, “Valkyrie”) managed to nab an Oscar for 2018’s worst job in the Editor’s chair. I understand some of his work was the result of a studio committee decision beyond his own personal wishes, but still…I would’ve pulled a Marlon Brando at the Oscars podium if it were me.

I also cannot believe that Queen members Brian May and Roger Taylor could’ve allowed this crap to be released (they had script and director approval, apparently), since they surely know there’s scarcely a believable moment in it. I know they know a lot more than I do about the subject, but I’m sorry, this film didn’t convince me in the slightest as real. It feels like Taylor and May were more concerned with projecting a certain image of the band itself and its legacy, rather than making a truly accurate and convincing biopic of Freddie Mercury. Just look to the fact that there is no mention in the script by Anthony McCarten (“The Theory of Everything”, “Darkest Hour”), of Queen playing concerts in Apartheid-era South Africa when there was a boycott on. What’s that, guys? Couldn’t find room for it in the script? Given how ADHD Ottman’s editing is, I’d say there was plenty of room in there. The best I can say here is that the music is terrific (right down to May and Taylor doing a version of the 20^th Century Fox logo fanfare at the start), and both Joe Mazzello and especially a dead-on Gwilym Lee are excellent in playing Queen members John Deacon and Brian May. Mazzello quietly steals scenes as the ‘Quiet’ member of the band, whilst Lee doesn’t just give an impersonation, he really convinces you he is May, and with a lot less character depth and screen time than is afforded lead actor Rami Malek. The rest? Oof, big swing and a miss. An Oscar-winning but skinny and bug-eyed Rami Malek is immediately wrong as Freddie. His teeth are embarrassingly exaggerated, and while I understand it might’ve been difficult to find suitable prosthetics without looking too ridiculous, and I understand they probably impeded poor Malek’s speech somewhat (Freddie was also quite able to close his mouth without the teeth causing his upper lip to move too far forward. As someone with a large overbite myself, I found it hard not to notice Malek struggling not to look awkward), the result is nonetheless unsatisfactory. It’s merely an example of just how grotesquely caricatured his entire performance is. Freddie was camp on stage, but everything I’ve heard and read suggests he was rather shy and quiet in his personal life. We don’t get even close to that impression from buck-toothed Malek. More important than the teeth (which muffle Malek’s voice to the point of sounding like John Hurt in “The Elephant Man”), he neither looks nor sounds like Freddie, with Malek having too much strain evident in his speaking voice trying to match Freddie’s. Sacha Baron Cohen would’ve been amazing in the role, May and Taylor (EPs of the film) are idiots for letting him slip out of their fingers, though at least they didn’t carry through with their supposed idea of featuring a Freddie-free second half of the film. That would’ve made for an even worse film.

The filmmakers also seem to have zero understanding of Freddie’s sexuality, or at least how to accurately and fairly portray it on screen. In fact, I’m surprised Brian and Roger are OK with a portrayal that sees them in particular as being rather homophobic and derisive towards Freddie’s sexuality, with May making a ‘Village People’ crack at one point that I can’t for the life of me believe is anywhere near true of May, who from everything I’ve seen and read seems like a lovely, polite chap who loved Freddie dearly. I know Freddie loved Mary very, very much. He wrote ‘Love of My Life’ about her for a reason, after all. He was also apparently involved with other women in his life, too. Yes, by today’s understanding there’s a chance Freddie’s sexuality might’ve been termed somewhat ‘fluid’ or even bisexual. However, he clearly leaned more heavily towards the homosexual end of the spectrum, and this film neither leans as heavily nor does it portray homosexuality in a very positive light. I know that Freddie isn’t really considered a great gay icon to many in the community. I’m straight, but I’ve heard that many gay people resent the way he hid his sexuality to the public, not to mention that he didn’t disclose his illness until he was on his death bed. I personally think a bloke deserves a right to privacy and not want to be embraced as a ‘gay icon’, but I can see the other point of view nonetheless. To the issue of not painting his homosexual encounters in a positive light, this may have been slightly unavoidable. Freddie died of AIDS and was sexually promiscuous (or at least careless, as many people of all persuasions were before people had really heard of HIV and AIDS), and since the majority of his sexual encounters I believe were with men…it puts the filmmakers into a bit of a tough spot, I suppose in not painting homosexuality in a negative light. However, with all that being said, I’m still not entirely sure I can give them a pass on that, and I certainly don’t think the film gets Freddie’s sexual orientation correct. The Mary to Men ratio is too out of whack to be truly accurate from what I’ve read about the man and I think this portrayal may be very upsetting for some in the gay community, let alone many Freddie fans. The villainous character of Paul Prenter is probably what ultimately tips the scales in a negative direction, as he’s portrayed (by Allen Leech, who looks and acts more like Freddie than Malek!) as unrealistically portrayed as 100% villainous (Even Brian May conceded in the press that Prenter wasn’t entirely bad. OK, so why sign off on a film that presents him that way?). Needless to say the man’s family weren’t happy with the portrayal in the slightest, nor should that.

Personally, I don’t think the portrayal of gay themes is the biggest flaw in the film, it’s the lack of believability in the entire story as truth overall which is the real problem (Not that I expect this to be a documentary, but I do expect it to be convincing). In fact, the one thing it does get absolutely right is that the British press hated Queen, but even that gets mucked up by a laughably histrionic press conference scene that should never have made it past the first draft. The rest of the story is a mixture of unbelievable bullshit, out-of-sequence storytelling (Freddie now being diagnosed with HIV in 1985 instead of 1987. Yes I understand why it was done here, but it’s important and they got it wrong), and cliched biopic fluff. I did like the bloke playing Sir Bob Geldof though, that was hilarious and spot-on.

As I said, the music is a highlight here, even if it’s obviously not as great as the real thing. The climactic Live Aid performance of ‘Radio Gaga’ (quite possibly the greatest live performance of all-time) is definitely one of the highlights of a terrible, terrible film. It was nice to hear the underrated ‘Hammer to Fall’ as well. However, as much as I understand cinematically why the film ends at Live Aid, in every other conceivable way it is the wrong decision (For starters, my favourite Queen album ‘A Kind of Magic’ – much as I acknowledge ‘A Night at the Opera’ as their best album – came out the year after Live Aid. So it pissed me off). Also, while I’ll never complain about hearing the positively euphoric ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ over the credits, a subsequent play of ‘Show Must Go On’ is an odd choice. Why? Because that song (which is absolutely heartbreaking and powerful) belongs to a period in Queen’s music catalogue that no one in the film seems to acknowledge ever existing. Then again, the film also wants us to believe the band had the shits with Freddie for wanting a solo career…even though Roger Taylor had been bringing out solo albums for years beforehand. Ottman, whether of his own volition or Fox’s prodding, has edited the entire film within an inch of its life, and combined with the far too brisk and underdone screenplay by McCarten it throws chronological events all catawampus. In the May and Taylor-approved condensed/reorganised/bullshit version of events, Queen are fully formed with Mercury at the helm and mixing their debut album 14 minutes into the film and five minutes after Freddie has joined. 22 minutes in and they’re releasing ‘Killer Queen’. May has publicly stated that true events needed to be compressed for Hollywood narrative purposes, but there has been far too much dramatic licence taken here to even be believable to non-Queen aficionados. It’s absurd. We don’t even hear Freddie changing his last name until their debut album is being mixed, ditto the name of the band itself changing to Queen. If this is how events actually played out in reality (and since May concedes the film needed to conform to Hollywood conventions, we can’t really say ‘Well, May and Taylor would know the truth better than anyone’), the filmmakers didn’t convince me of it. I do however fully believe in the scene where Roger Taylor hits on Freddie’s sister at the dinner table. I don’t even care if that one’s true, it just sounds exactly like what a horny Roger Taylor would’ve done, and it’s at least hilarious.

I mentioned Ottman’s editing being undeserving of an Oscar, and the chief evidence of this is the infamous first meeting with Queen’s first manager John Reid. Well-played by Littlefinger himself Aidan Gillen, Reid comes off relatively well here portrayal-wise (“Rocketman”, the Elton John biopic directed by Fletcher is apparently a whole different affair), but Ottman whether by his own hand or prodded by others edits the absolute fuck out of the scene to the point where all the cuts are distracting and ridiculous (The scene where ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is recorded is just as badly done). Joe Mazzello is excellent portraying a character (John Deacon) the film simply isn’t very interested in. That’s a shame, because the supposedly close relationship between Deacon and Mercury (the brains behind Queen’s ill-fated disco album ‘Hot Space’) is one worth exploring, I think. Instead, ‘Deacy’ is in lock-step with Taylor and May’s characters here, albeit far less vocal about it. I guess that’s what happens I guess when there’s only two people around to give creative input/financial backing (Deacon is still alive as of 2019, but left the band after Freddie’s death and reportedly lives a quiet life mostly uninvolved in the remaining band’s activities). Elsewhere in the cast, I understand exactly why we get the stunt casting of Mike Myers, but his cameo shows you exactly why he shouldn’t be here.

Narratively all over the map, this biopic is so rapidly paced and choppy it feels as is if it’s playing on fast-forward by someone on speed. Coupled with being rather an unconvincing portrait, and featuring a completely miscast lead, this one’s a total bust for me. The music is great (with Malek’s vocals seamlessly mixed with a soundalike as well as bits of Freddie himself), but that’s what CDs and YouTube are for. Freddie deserved better than this. It completely misses the mark. The only Oscar this film deserved was for Sound Mixing (and indeed it won).

Rating: D+