Graham King and Antoine Fuqua’s Michael is a fitfully enjoyable if terminally mild jukebox biopic — flush, glossy, tidy and sanitized into an all-but-bloodless, family-friendly state of flatline ho-hum. Except all those great Jackson songs from the ‘80s aren’t ho-hum, so there’s that.
The flashy musical performance sequences (all the hits except “Black or White“!) are generically pulse-quickening and “fun” as far as that goes. I really felt the foot-tapping mojo during the creation-of-Thriller sequences.
Yes, Jaafar Jackson (son of Jermaine) delivers a triple grade-A impersonation of uncle Michael in his prime. And yet throughout the film I was unable to shake the obvious fact that Jaafar, while pleasant-looking with symmetrical features, is nowhere near as pretty as Michael. The producers should have found a look-alike Jackson impersonator-actor who can moonwalk like a champ…the world’s full of them.
And yes, John Logan’s script dutifully delivers (repetitively) an abusive, old-fashioned villain in the person of Michael’s ogre-ish, hard-driving dad, Joseph Jackson (Colman Domingo under pounds of face-altering makeup)…an authoritarian prick who’s cut from the exact same cloth as Will Smith’s Richard Williams in King Richard.
The only dramatically satisfying sequence in the whole film is when Joseph (aka Joe) receives a termination fax from Michael’s recently hired attorney, John Branca, a one-sentence message stating that Joe is no longer Michael’s manager. Yes! But that’s it. Nothing else happens in Michael to match this single sweet moment.
But then Joe won’t go away. He keeps hanging around and pushing for the Victory tour blah blah. Will you get outta here, man? We’re sick of your ass. You’re bad news!
Dramatically Michael is close to the level of Spidey and His Amazing Friends, if Spidey had a cruel, physically abusive dad. On a side-by-side basis Michael makes Disney’s The Adventures of Spin & Marty, the ‘50s TV series that was enfolded into The Mickey Mouse Club, seem as dramatically formidable as Eugene O’Neill‘s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
And yet (I’m repeating myself) it’s been handsomely, forcefully, urgently produced and is undeniably “watchable” if you put away your Kate Erbland-approved ethical compass. The crowd of morally vacant degenerates I saw it with last night were clearly delighted, I can tell you. Many were happily hanging out in the theatre and in the lobby afterwards, chit-chatting and coo-cooing the high moments. If people don’t like a film they immediately head for the parking garage.
Friendo to HE: “Was your audience mostly white?” HE to friendo: “Mixed suburban types. Hispanics, light-skinned POCs, Wonderbreads, white Leave It To Beaver families. No hardcore hip-hop street homeys with skullcaps.”
One final observation: Michael dies when the hair-burning accident happens and he goes into recovery at the Brotman Medical Center. The movie just stalls and stops whatever it’s been doing since the opening credits, and it’s like “what’s happening?…the fire has gone out.” The film keeps going for another 25 or 30 minutes but it feels rote and robot-like. Hell, the Brotman hospital bed-and-bandage recovery footage is like “what is this?”