‘Michael’ Review: A Star’s Legacy Reduced to Highlights and Hollow Moments

In 2022 it was officially announced that a movie depicting the life of pop sensation Michael Jackson was going to be made. After four years of ups and downs, production issues, and problems with the estate, the film is done and hitting the big screen. Michael follows the star’s life from his younger years in the family band, The Jackson 5, to the release of one of the highest-grossing and most influential albums of all time, Thriller. Attempting to give the audience a look behind the curtain and a spectacle aiming to display what made Michael Jackson so alluring, unfortunately the film was not able to capture the magic of one of the world’s brightest stars. Read our full review for Michael below. 

Like most biopics, Michael does not give us any reasons to exist. It seems like studios and directors of these projects think that the most important box to check is replication, not meditation. There is no deeper analysis of who Michael Jackson is as a person. He is instead depicted as a pure of heart, borderline Disney character whose only downfalls come from the fact that he cares too much. Maybe Michael was like this, a perfect and lonely kid, but there is nothing interesting about how the film shows this. I want to see the process of the artist making one of the biggest records of all time, not just a montage of how he chose the album title. Most biopics make this critical error. There is no interest in showing the behind-the-scenes artistic development, but instead an emphasis on replicating the live performances to perfection. 

I have to give it to Michael, the film did a great job at reconstructing his live performances. This is mostly to do with Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s real life nephew who plays him in this movie. It is almost uncanny how similar he looks to his uncle and how spot on his portrayal is. He is really the only aspect of the movie that works, especially during the live performances. Yet I am really trying to find the point of it all. The movie is a boring conversation between people and then a great recreation of an iconic performance, rinse and repeat. You would be better off just going on YouTube and searching for these iconic performances at home. At the end of the day I was just bored by so much of it. Michael gave me whiplash every time it went from incredibly mundane to showing an epic performance. 

The other performances of note are Colman Domingo, as the big bad Joseph, Nia Long, as Michael’s mother, and Miles Teller, as the powerhouse manager John Branca. I am sad to announce that the rumors are true, Colman Domingo is giving a laughable performance that is by far his worst to date. Like Michael, he is reduced to a stereotypical villain character who is given no justification or analysis. He simply is just a bad man. Not to mention the makeup team made him look absolutely insane and unreal. Nia Long is giving a solid performance as the star’s mother, but it was not extraordinary enough to stand out against Jaafar. Miles Teller was just fine. He is introduced as this overconfident, big shot manager who will help Michael make all his dreams come to fruition, but after a while it is clear he is just there to be in the scene or drive the plot forward. 

The main problem, as I have stated before, is that this film is not interested in how these people think or make decisions, it is only interested in showing those decisions. It’s yet another lifeless, formulaic studio biopic that is best watched with your mind turned off ready to listen to the hits. In the end the film hints at a continuation to this story, but I am begging the studios to ignore the million, perhaps billion, dollars this will make and not make us sit through the slow decline of his career. I cannot in good faith recommend this movie. As a fan of Michael Jackson’s music, I think it adds nothing to what we know about him or his creative process. If you enjoy every by-the-books biopic, this will be the same, but at some point we all need to realize that we deserve better than this mindless fluff. 

Michael is directed by Antoine Fuqua and stars Jaafar Jackson, Colman Domingo, Nia Long, Miles Teller, and Juliano Valdi. The film was released on April 24.

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