Bohemian Rhapsody: Review

Queen: Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor, John Deacon. Bohemian Rhapsody tells the story of world-renowned rock band Queen and their rise to fame.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a well-performed, yet underwhelming biopic.

If there’s one element that director Bryan Singer gets right with Bohemian Rhapsody, it’s the concert sequences. A story of perhaps the most legendary band of all time – or more aptly the frontrunner Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) – it would be difficult not to ace these pivotal musical moments. Rami Malek embodies Freddie Mercury’s eccentricities and gestures, making these concert sequences so much more striking and emotional – those who ever got to see Queen live relive the memory, and those who didn’t wish that they had. Apart from the atrocious CGI crowd during the LiveAid performance, and the awful graphics illustrating the stops on their US tour, Singer’s direction paired with the iconic music of Queen, undoubtedly makes these concert sequences the highlight of the film.

As a film detached from the soundtrack, however, Bohemian Rhapsody struggles. The narrative doesn’t delve deep enough into the band’s lives pre-Queen; the characters are all so surface level. It omits huge chunks of Freddie Mercury’s life that made him the man he was. There’s little exploration of his relationship with his far more conservative parents – in fact they appear merely three times throughout the whole film – who he was before he became Freddie Mercury, and, although it is touched upon, there’s surprisingly little about his sexuality and how denying it and hiding it affected him mentally. As for the other members, we literally learn nothing about them, except that Brian May (Gwilym Lee) studied astrophysics, Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) dentistry, and John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) electrical engineering. With a 135-minute run time, there’s more than enough time to probe these issues, but Singer just doesn’t. The band’s rise to fame seems so smooth, and whenever they do face any trouble, with record label executive Ray Forster (Mike Myers), the character is unbelievably cartoonish, but not in a funny way. As well as this, Freddie Mercury is the only band member who they attempted to age. It makes sense not to age Brian May so much because he really does still look like that, but Roger Taylor looks young from the start of the band’s career till the end, making it very difficult to believe that these men had married and had children. If it weren’t for the intertitles explaining that time had passed, it wouldn’t be very easy to tell.

The reason why biopics like this, about well-loved British bands, are so successful, and why many people will probably bypass the fact that realistically as a film this isn’t brilliant, is because of the sentimentality of it. People love Queen, and people have such a strong attachment to their music no matter what generation they are, and Bryan Singer knows this and is using this to his advantage. That’s why there is such a strong focus on watching them perform live, and why he decided to include 4 songs in a row at their LiveAid performance. Singer knows that people are going to come to see this film because they want the music – but surely if I just wanted to watch Queen perform, I could Google it, and this time I would actually see the real members.

Rami Malek deserves props for taking on such a risky role as Freddie Mercury, but director Bryan Singer deserves no props for this imperfect rehashing of Queen’s rise to fame.