You can tell right away that director Tate Taylor (The Help) has made Get On Up (Universal, 8.1.14), a biopic about the legendary soul-and-blues singer James Brown, into a glossy, Hollywood-type, mainstream-friendly package. It would also seem that Chadwick Boseman (42) is too tall, too good-looking, too light-skinned and too smooth and mellow of voice to convincingly “be” Brown, who was shorter and darker with a rapscallion manner and a voice that had a raspy, rough gravel quality and was somewhat higher-pitched. It’s not “wrong” for this film to have softened Brown in the way that Dustin Hoffman softened Lenny Bruce in Bob Fosse‘s Lenny (’74), but…well, it’s early yet.
