BOO!-HEMIAN RHAPSODY
Long wait for disappointing Queen movie
“Formulas work. We like formulas.”
It takes just two sentences for “Bohemian Rhapsody” to own itself — no, not Queen’s immortal chart topper, but rather this sprawling, jumbled and disappointingly airbrushed new movie about the legendary rock band and especially its incandescent frontman, Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek). It’s Freddie who, in 1975, decides that Queen will defy formula and craft a new musical masterpiece that fuses ballad, opera and rock inspirations into an ear-tickling, genre-melding opus for the ages.
But the finished work predictably meets resistance from an EMI Records executive named Ray Foster, who’s convinced that no radio station will play a single that runs six minutes long. (Foster, a fictionalized character, is played by a nearly unrecognizable Mike Myers, in a “Wayne’s World” tie-in that almost but not quite justifies the price of admission.) The irony is that “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a song that triumphantly bucked convention, should now serve as the title of a movie that embraces every cliché in the days-ofour-lives biopic handbook.
You know what you’re in for from the fakeout of a prologue in which Freddie dons a singlet and marches onto a stage in front of thousands of screaming computer-generated fans at Wembley Stadium. It’s 1985, at the massive Live Aid concert in London, a crucial moment of resurrection for Mercury and the embattled band — which naturally means that before we even hear the first lick, the movie will abruptly cut away to 1970s London, diving headlong into a feature-length flashback showing How All This Came to Be.
Even in a pre-“Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” world, did this kind of how-Imet-your-Mama structural device ever really work? Ostensibly designed to build suspense and anticipation, the opener instead sets a lazy narrative pattern for the movie.
The story of Queen’s glorious, turbulent, often-controversial rise to fame is, of course, widely known; the band’s dizzyingly playful, singable and expansive musical catalog, even more so. But surely this is all the more reason for a movie about these artists to feel wildly urgent, unpredictable and alive, to mind us of a time when rm-busting experimentaon and glam-rock flamboynce were hardly guarantors f musical immortality. And at times this “Bohemian Rhapsody,” credited o director Bryan Singer who was fired during prouction and replaced by Dexter Fletcher), does stir o a kind of life. No picture eaturing Malek’s droll, mischievous and wholly committed star turn could eally do otherwise. The ompellingly soft-spoken tar of “Mr. Robot” may not have been an obvious hoice to don Freddie Merury’s silver-sequined umpsuit and almighty pornstache, but Malek hurls himself into his rockgod transformation with a voracious, go-for-broke energy that keeps you watching and, every so often, believing.
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’
Rating: PG-13, for thematic elements, suggestive material, drug content and language Running time: 2 hours, 14 minutes Playing: Opens Nov. 2 in general release