The best bit about Bob’s biopic? His classic song as the final credits roll
Bob Marley: One Love
Cert: 12A, 1hr 44mins
★★★★★
The Iron Claw
Cert: 15, 2hrs 12mins
★★★★★
Turning Red
Cert: PG, 1hr 40mins
★★★★★
Gassed Up
Cert: 15, 1hr 42mins
★★★★★
At the end of the packed media screening of Bob Marley: One Love, something unusual happened. Half the audience upped and left, as normal, but the other half remained, singing along – a few even danced – to the reggae classic that gives the film its subtitle and pulses out so movingly over the end credits.
Tellingly, however, it was probably the best moment of the 100-odd minutes that preceded it. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green, hitherto known for the tennis biopic King Richard, uses them to tell the extraordinary but all-too-brief life story of the hugely influential Jamaican musician, who died of cancer in 1981. He was only 36.
To be fair, Green certainly provides a couple of hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck moments that rival it. First, when Bob and his backing band, The Wailers, having fled the violence of Jamaica’s near civil war in the late 1970s for the relative sanctuary of London, are tentatively feeling their way through Exodus for the first time in the living room of their Chelsea digs.
The second comes in one of the film’s flashbacks, to when Marley was trying to break through in Jamaica. An audition is going nowhere until his band abandon their US covers and launch into their own song, Simmer Down. It’s glorious and, frankly, I could have done with more. But this is a film that concentrates on the last five years of Marley’s life and ends up covering that ground in a slightly sanitised, 12A way. It cries out for a more compelling route through the same events.
Kingsley Ben-Adir, all flailing dreadlocks and accent that’s just short of requiring subtitles, provides a charismatic presence but is half-a-head too tall and a touch too handsome to totally convince as the man himself. Bond star Lashana Lynch, however, is terrific as Marley’s wife, Rita.
You can’t say The Iron Claw doesn’t set out its stall from the start. It begins in the wrestling ring, quickly shows us the painful head-hold that gives the film its title then rolls forward to the late 1970s so that one of the main characters can explain ‘the family curse’. Those who know about American pro wrestling will probably get more from this dramatisation of the travails of the Von Erich family, who are ruled with a metaphorical iron claw by its muscular patriarch, Fritz, played extremely well by Holt McCallany.
But as the tragedies and toxic masculinity pile up, I found myself wondering how long Zac Efron had
been preparing for his role – his body resembles that of a professional body-builder – and whether the four brothers’ haircuts could possibly have been that awful.
Turning Red was initially released on Disney+ two years ago but now the Pixar animation, which became famous for being one of the first children’s cartoons to mention periods, is getting a cinema release, and it’s well worth a look. The fact that 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian Mei Lee suddenly starts turning into a giant red panda at moments of high emotion turns out to have little to do with menstruation (‘Did the red peony bloom?’ asks her concerned mother), but rather more to do with growing up and embracing your loud, messy inner beast. Good, if biologically slightly confusing.
Scooter gangs that roar around our city streets stealing mobile phones from pedestrians are one of the great banes of modern life. So it’s hard to sympathise with the five young protagonists at the heart of Gassed Up, who do exactly that.
But we get there eventually, thanks to a well-structured screenplay, some scary Albanian gangsters and good performances from a cast led by Stephen Odubola and Craige Middleburg. Best brush up on your street-talk first, though.