Biography, Drama, Music – Rated PG-13 – 2h 7min
3 out of 5 stars because the music is still great
Movie critics don’t really have the option to recommend a film of low artistic value, even when it’s more enjoyable than that value would suggest. Michael—the biopic about Michael Jackson’s rise to becoming one of the most successful artists of all time, already dividing audiences and critics since its opening weekend—is a good example of that dissonance.
The film is a shameless, Spotify-plays-driving, hollow biopic—one of the weaker entries in this recent wave of music-artist films—yet it’s quite buoyant at the box office on the sheer force of the music. That music belongs to a genius with a near-mythical global status who, as much as we know, allegedly committed some of the most heinous acts imaginable. Critics have taken issue with the film for sidestepping those parts of his life and conveniently ending the story in 1988, at the height of his success. What’s often ignored is the ongoing legal mess between the Jackson estate and multiple accusers, which makes any direct reference to those issues nearly impossible without violating settlement terms. Within those limits, the filmmakers worked with what they had. The rest is about the music. Mostly.
At heart, the story follows Michael Jackson (Jaafar Jackson as the adult, Juliano Valdi as the child) as he tries to break away from his father, Joseph (a frightening Colman Domingo), while creating Off the Wall and Thriller. The father-son scenes have some bite—Domingo is very good—but they circle the same point: Joseph claims he made Michael and is owed everything; Michael avoids confronting him directly and sends others to do it. Early scenes of Joseph beating young Michael with a belt are brief but effective, though the film doesn’t go much deeper than that.
Most of the runtime is taken up by recreated performances, and they sound great. It’s hard not to react—seeing and hearing these songs in IMAX, with that kind of sound, is genuinely exhilarating. It reminds us that Michael Jackson was the one who broke MTV’s racial barrier, becoming the first Black artist in heavy rotation. He made clubgoers ecstatic and music executives even happier—for obvious, financial reasons.
What the film doesn’t really get into is that he was named “Most Charities Supported by a Pop Star” by the Guinness World Records in 2000, tied to 39 organizations, with estimates of his donations ranging between $300 and $500 million to causes like education, children’s health, and AIDS research. Instead, it narrows that side of him to a few carefully chosen gestures—hospital visits, signing autographs for children, a brief mention of a donation to burn victims—framed to underline how innocuous those interactions were.
Whether it’s nostalgia or discovery, it works, helped a lot by Jaafar Jackson’s committed performance. The film is built as escapism, plain and simple—even if the man at its center remains a complex and elusive figure, carefully curated and never fully graspable, and probably bad—really, really Bad.
