Queen is one of those bands that were out of vogue when I was at the age of choosing my own music and not relying on whatever my parents had around the house. This would be the late 1980s into the early 90s, and I was gravitating towards hair metal and alternative music during this time. My parents listened to sixties rock and roll and British Invasion, so I was never exposed to the likes of Queen. My introduction to this group came at the hands of Mike Myers and Wayne’s World, and for the longest time, Bohemian Rhapsody, the song, was the only thing of theirs I knew. Later, I would hear some of their other hits thanks to friends that had copies of Queen’s Greatest Hits, but their music, catchy as some of it was, had never been my style.
By this time in my life, Freddie Mercury, the singer for Queen, had recently died, and his Aids diagnosis and queer life were starting to be big news. Pictures of him were showing up everywhere, and he was becoming the poster child for the Aids epidemic. I can’t remember when I started actively listening to Queen, but it was sometime before 2018’s docu-drama hit theaters. Still, while there are some songs of theirs I really like, I am not really a fan of them as a whole and have never listened to an album of their front to back, not even a greatest hits compilation. But what music of theirs I like, I really like, and I’ve grown to appreciate them as a band. So a film like Bohemian Rhapsody should be right up my alley.
It tells the story of the creation of the band as we know it all the way through to the historic Live Aid performance before cutting to end credit titles that tell us the tragic final days of Freddie Mercury. It’s told in a way that makes their rise interesting and peppered with recognizable songs most people would know. A good deal of the film is not particularly factual, though, which will frustrate the die-hard Queen fans, but for those of us who want the basics and don’t get bogged down by minutiae, this is a perfectly fine telling of how it kind of happened.
Before I get into the film proper, I must address the elephant in the room. Director Bryan Singer has, in recent years, been accused and taken to court a number of times for sexual assault of a minor. While he has yet to be convicted for any of these alleged assaults, the sheer number of accusations that have come forth is damning. It caused this film to be withdrawn from nomination for the GLAAD Media Award for the Outstanding Film award- Wide Release category. Singer’s name was also removed from consideration for the BAFTA Award for Best British Film, though the film itself stayed in competition. Since 2019, he has been shunned in Hollywood and has no credits going forward at present on his résumé. For a talented producer and director, it is a sudden and seemingly final end to a promising career.
While the main focus of this film is on Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek), the film begins at the birth of Queen, not Freddie’s birth. Within a few minutes of the movie’s start, Freddie is approaching a British pub band, Smile, who have just lost their lead singer and are on the verge of disbanding altogether. His vocal range impresses the group, and we cut to them on stage introducing their new singer. While the audience is at first frigid towards the “Paki” singer, he quickly wins them over, and the legend that is Freddie Mercury begins.
The film then follows the band as they rise in popularity, cut records, tour the world, break up, then get back together for the Live Aid concert. While this is all interesting and the music is great, this treads familiar ground and never really overcomes the tropes of these kinds of films. We’ve seen it all before in films such as Walk the Line, Selina, and even in parody form in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. These are tropes because, while they work on a certain level, they are also par for the course when making this kind of film. After all, were there no drama behind the scenes, there would be no entertaining scenes for a movie. The problem lies in the filmmakers manufacturing drama where none existed. Mike Myers has a cringy cameo as fictional EMI executive Ray Foster putting the screws to the band over his dislike for the song Bohemian Rhapsody just so that we can have a scene where they break with EMI and set off on their own. None of this happened, of course and this whole scene exists more as a wink at the audience because of Mike Myers’ scene with the same song on Wayne’s World. Likewise, when Freddie goes off to make solo albums, it is treated like the band is breaking up, which also never happened. I understand why the changes were made, but fans of the band will be upset over the blatant alterations to history.
Even more egregious, though, is the treatment of Freddie’s homosexuality and later Aids diagnosis. This part of the movie feels like it was written by a straight male in the mid-1980s. It vilifies his lifestyle while painting the disease as a sort of punishment for it. It also trivializes the whole affair by moving the timeline up a few years and dropping the reveal to the band right before they take the stage for Live Aid when in actuality he was diagnoses years later. There were some issues behind the scenes when this film was being made, including a last-minute director replacement well into production, and while it is hard to pin down what scenes were compromised, I have to believe this stuff was a part of it.
This film also suffers from trying to tell too much of the story rather than focusing on a specific period in the artist’s life. A Complete Unknown avoided this trap by narrowing the focus to a specific period of time. Bohemian Rhapsody elects to try and tell the entire history of the band from cradle to grave, and what we get is a glossed-over Greatest Hits, only held together by some really great music and a terrific performance by Rami Malek. The only thing lacking there is him actually doing the singing. Instead, it was decided to allow Rami to lip-sync to Freddie Mercury’s original vocals.
Bohemian Rhapsody is not an awful film. But it is far too vanilla, doesn’t explore the subject matter deeply enough, and tries to cover too much ground. We are left to wonder what the original pitch for this movie was back when Sacha Baron Cohen was attached. That version was apparently far more gritty and character driven but would have made a lot less money. People seeing Bohemian Rhapsody at the time were there primarily for the music, and because of that alone, it made a lot of money at the box office. But it’s shallow. We learn next to nothing about the character of Freddie Mercury and even less about the rest of the band. This makes it far too unsatisfying a film to recommend on any level other than the songs. And you can find legitimate performances of Queen online to get a real sense of what they were like as a band. This ultimately makes this film unnecessary viewing.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Graham King
Best Actor: Rami Malek (won)
Best Film Editing: John Ottman (won)
Best Sound Editing: John Warhurst and Nina Hartstone (won)
Best Sound Mixing: Paul Massey, Tim Cavagin, and John Casali (won)
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Release Date: November 2, 2018
Running Time: 134 Minutes
Rated PG-13
Starring: Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Joe Mazzello, Aidan Gillen, Allen Leech, Tom Hollander, and Mike Myers
Directed By: Bryan Singer
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