Review:

The only reason this movie is watchable at all is because Rami Malek is absolutely spectacular. The Academy Award winning film for Most Editing, sorry, I mean Best Editing is a terribly written, directed and edited film that fails as a biopic and a movie. There are very clear places where, even with no knowledge of the factual events, you can tell things are being manipulated to heighten drama and force unearned focus on the rest of Queen. The go out of their way to give the other members of Queen little bits of credit on tent pole songs. Yes, there is more to Queen than just Freddie, but this is clearly a Freddie Mercury story, not a Queen one. We aren't following Brian May's bands before Queen and we don't see Roger Taylor falling in love with his wife and having kids. There feels to be very obvious influences forcing the movie to divert the story threads through other characters. The amount of creative liberty that they already take with the timeline and and changing things to make things a lot more dramatic than they actually were, it's unnatural that they then put forth the effort to take moments away from the main character to highlight side characters that the audience will never connect with. In general, the story is constantly ramping up and then skipping over things, and then just ramping up again. The first half hour is a very unsettling mixture of trying to jump right onto the full speed ahead Queen train, but also trying to build the players. I read a review that said Bohemian Rhapsody is more of a medially than a greatest hits, and that is exactly the problem. We aren't just hitting highlights and making a clip show, me are getting some odd Frankenstein mashup that just doesn't flow or read correctly. The cinemtography is boring, there are too many scenes of exactly the same generic events unfolding (YMS brings up how many times we see one band member pulling a riff out of nowhere and the rest of the song just miraculously being improvised on the spot), every scene is constant camera changes to the point where it almost feel like a parody. The only things I can see as positives from this film are everything Rami Malek does and how well the crew was able to recreate the spectacle of scenes like Live Aid in both magnitude, atmosphere, and look of everything from the stadiums to the wardrobes. If we replace the script, director and editor, this could have been great, but what we have is really just a huge portfolio for Rami Malek to use when he additions for future roles.