Michael

Grade: C+

There’s an elephant in the room throughout Michael, and it remains one. A Michael Jackson biopic that doesn’t acknowledge what happened with him in the 90s until the end (to put it delicately) is like an O.J. Simpson biopic that ends at the peak of his football career. Michael concludes at the beginning of the Bad album/single/tour. It’s all rise, and very little fall.

It’s little to no narrative, as well. The soundtrack is packed with wall-to wall songs and montages. The songs are great, they sound fantastic in the theater, and several of the numbers are filmed effectively by director Antoine Fuqua (The Equalizer movies, Training Day, Bait, The Replacement Killers). It’s a revue featuring a small helping of storytelling, and probably works better on the Broadway stage, where it’s been playing for 5 years.

12-year-old Juliano Valdi is adorable as young Michael in the early scenes. Half an hour in, “current” Michael is played by Jaafar Jackson (Jermaine’s son, Michael’s nephew). He is extraordinarily talented, as was his uncle, and it’s an excellent tribute band performance. He has ruined it for all the MJ impressionists and cosplayers around the world. As Joe Jackson, the father/manager, Colman Domingo provides some of the most life the film has. Miles Teller does nice work as the manager Michael chooses to go with after firing his dad. I liked Mike Myers in his one scene as a record executive. Since it’s Myers, I kept waiting for an inevitable in-jokey reference to something (à la his scene as a similar character in Bohemian Rhapsody), but refreshingly, he’s there to just act – and he plays it well.

Upon request from the woman herself, Janet Jackson is not a character in the movie. Through bits about Michael’s obsession with Peter Pan and Neverland, the pain medication he receives after his nose job, and his interactions with children, it keeps hinting at what we all know about. It’s all sanitized, with no follow through. In 2003, when rehearsing for a production of Free to Be…You and Me, we watched a video of Michael’s performance of “When We Grow Up,” a song that reinforces that we’re beautiful people just the way we are, with the line “we don’t have to change at all.” The joke amongst us was “Somebody should have told him that. Don’t change, Michael.” It was difficult for me to celebrate him too much, considering the unexplored part of his story that happened later.

The last 15 minutes is an excellent mini-concert. Don’t expect anything more substantive than that. It gets to feel like filler. Ambiguously and cryptically, the last thing we see before the end credits is a title card that just says “his story continues.” Who knows what that’s about. It could mean a sequel is coming (IMDb doesn’t show anything about a Michael 2 at the moment), or it could simply serve as a general statement about how his music lives on. Either way, Michael is a lukewarm affair. It’s a shallow playlist, that simultaneously manages to have perfect pitch and be tone deaf.

Grade: C+