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Bohemian Rhapsody
(20th Century Fox/Regency Enterprises)
By Lucas Allen
The music of Queen certainly has a place with music fans worldwide beyond classic rock radio. But there’s more to these hit songs when the story of the band has yet to be told on screen. The new musical biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” attempts to tell about the band’s meteoric rise to fame with their flamboyant lead singer Freddie Mercury.
This long in-development project (with funnyman Sacha Baron Cohen cast as Mercury at one point) finally crawls its way to theaters from “X-Men” director Bryan Singer.
After moving from Zanzibar to London, Mercury (Rami Malek) follows the city’s underground music scene of the early 70s, much to the disapproval of his father. After seeing a performance by the band Smile, he approaches two of the band’s members, Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy), for a gig as their new lead singer.
A year later, now known as Queen with the addition of bassist John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello), the band starts to gain notoriety in their country before embarking on a U.S. tour. While all that happens, Freddie marries his long-time sweetheart Mary (Lucy Boynton) before becoming interested in his bisexuality.
Queen then gets more experimental by recording their second album, “A Night at the Opera,” and its masterrpiece single “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Despite the objections of label head Ray Foster (Mike Myers) over its length, the song catapulted the band to worldwide fame and fortune. But as the hits keep coming, Mercury finds himself spiraling out of control with his excess to the point it affects his relationships and the band’s future. Everything comes to a head when the band has to perform at Live Aid in an unforgettable performance.
It’s difficult to try to tell a grand story of a hugely successful band in a standard movie run time. This one certainly hits some of the major highlights of the band’s rise to success and their many tribulations. The only problem is that they only managed to skim through their story just to try to fit much of it in for a run time of over two hours. Plus, it tends to pay more attention to the lead singer than the band members especially for his flamboyant personality.
If you’re expecting a definitive account of how they really become successful, you’re better off watching a documentary all about them. But if you’re more interested in the music than the story, the movie does a good job inserting much of their classic material into each scene. The performance scenes, including the wonderfully recreated Live Aid performance alone, are worth the price of admission thanks to some well-done filmmaking. No matter how many times you heard these songs on the radio, hearing them in theater sized-surround sound speakers make them feel fresh to the ears.
The best thing the movie has going for is Malek’s pretty flawless performance as Mercury. Using some of his vocals (along with the late singer’s recordings) and fake upper dentures to simulate the singer’s overbite, the actor perfectly captures the ambition and flamboyant nature of the legend’s stage persona. It’s almost like Freddie himself was resurrected for one last grand performance.
The rest of the actors playing the band are pretty good, while Boynton deserves credit for bringing something to her character as a rock star’s girlfriend. It’s also ironic to see Myers playing the guy who rejected “Bohemian Rhapsody” when 25 years earlier he rocked it out in the car in Wayne’s World.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” doesn’t have the best of qualities to be a great rock biopic, but fans of Queen will still enjoy it more for the music and how some of their classics were made. It certainly fun to watch in that regard along with the heavy drama to be expected about Freddie Mercury’s extraordinary life. For what it is, it still understands why we love Queen as a rock band.
THE MOVIE’S RATING: PG-13 (for thematic elements, suggestive material, drug content, and language)
THE CRITIC’S RATING: 3.25 Stars (Out of Four)
