Cha’mone! I suppose it was inevitable: yet another music‑artist biopic rolling off the overly long conveyor belt. At this point, it would be quicker to list the musicians who haven’t had one. However, when it comes to sheer cultural wattage, few figures have ever burned as brightly as Michael Jackson, a star whose influence still radiates nearly twenty years after his death.

I grew up with MJ’s music. Born in the mid‑’70s, I lived through the ’80s when Thriller wasn’t just an album, it was a global event. I liked his music well enough, though I wouldn’t call myself a die‑hard fan. If anything, I’ve always felt his work declined over time. The Jackson 5 were electric, his early solo work was fine, but Off the Wall was the moment he truly became Michael Jackson and (if you ask me) his best album. Thriller was seismic. Bad was… well, good. And then the slide began. But I’m not here to write about his discography, I’m here to review his biopic.

Jaafar Jackson (MJ’s nephew) plays adult Michael and the film opens with him preparing to go onstage during the Bad tour in 1988, before rewinding to 1966 and young MJ in Gary, Indiana. We meet Joseph Jackson (Colman Domingo), the belt‑happy patriarch who moulded the Jackson 5 through sheer force and fear. The film charts their rise from local clubs to Motown to international fame.

Then we jump to the late ’70s: adult MJ, awards, gold records, the solo breakout. We get the expected collection of milestones, Off the Wall, Bubbles the chimp, rhinoplasty, Thriller, that Pepsi commercial, all the way through to the 1988 Bad tour where the film started.

Overall? Michael is disappointing. It does come from the producers of Bohemian Rhapsody, a film that (in retrospect) was very glossy but ultimately hollow. Outside of the music and the admittedly brilliant Live Aid sequence, it never really explored Queen or Freddie Mercury. Michael repeats that exact formula, right down to the getting ready to take to the stage, a jump back to the past, a flow back to that starting point. There’s even a Mike Myers cameo where he plays an executive. I swear this film is a MJ swap of Bohemian Rhapsody. Same beats, same framing, same lack of depth. I reckon the initial production meeting was, “Let’s remake Bohemian Rhapsody, beat for beat… but with Michael Jackson.”

The musical recreations are immaculate, the staging is meticulous, but everything in between is flat. It’s a safe film, terrified of interrogating its subject, content to be a greatest‑hits slideshow with Jaafar Jackson just doing a very expensive tribute act. It feels less like a $200 million blockbuster and more like a mid‑tier documentary padded out for a Sunday afternoon TV slot. I suspect that most of the budget went on music rights rather than the screenplay.

And the screenplay is the fatal flaw. The 20‑odd minutes covering the Jackson 5 era are genuinely compelling. Juliano Krue Valdi is superb as young MJ, carrying real emotional weight, but once the film moves past that period, it dissolves into disconnected scenes with no narrative spine. You never get a sense of who Michael Jackson was as a person. The film is obsessed with what he did, not why he did it or how it shaped him. I feel that a Jackson 5‑focused biopic would have been far richer: Joseph’s abuse, the family dynamics, the psychological fallout, the forging of a prodigy under impossible pressure. The things that shaped the child to become the global star that he was. That’s a story with teeth.

Instead, we get a shallow, estate‑approved portrait. The brothers almost fade into the background after the Jackson 5 opening. Janet, arguably the most important emotional sibling relationship of his adult life, is absent entirely. MJ’s menagerie gets more screentime than his family. Snake? Yes. Chimp? Yes. Giraffe? Yes. Llama? Yes. Janet Jackson? Absolutely not. Nia Long plays Katherine, MJ’s mother and one of the most central figures in his life, but she is used as nothing more than a bit of set dressing. There’s one real scene between Katherine and Joseph, and that’s about it. Michael is a strange film that is about MJ, but refuses to actually be about him. It just wants viewers to know two things. 1) MJ made music. 2) He was popular. There’s no exploration into who MJ was, just that he made music.

The Thriller album was such a massive, monumental release that it changed music from that point on. It opened the doors for so many black artists; it was one of the most important and defining moments in music history. Yet, in this film, it’s barely mentioned. You get a (really good) recreation of the filming of the Thriller video, a bit about the choreography of the Beat It video (no mention of Michael Peters though)… and that’s it. The time between the release of Thriller and Bad were the years where MJ’s star power was incredible, the period when he grew as an artist and changed the industry. A time where the film could’ve explored what made MJ tick, what made him push for perfection. But it doesn’t. It just glides over it all in a couple of minutes of shallow scenes with zero insight into MJ.

The film sets up, but then ignores the long shadow of his upbringing, the trauma, the contradictions, the complexities of the man. As a result, Jaafar Jackson never gets to be his uncle; he’s stuck performing a sanitised cosplaying facsimile, the sort of thing you’d see on a talent show judged by Simon Cowell, golden buzzer and all. Okay, the few minutes after the infamous Pepsi ad/hair-on-fire incident are pretty good, and you get a very slight feel for who MJ was; the film very nearly becomes one about MJ then, almost. But that’s about it. A handful of meaningful minutes in a two-hour film, followed by a mad dash to the end credits.

I can’t blame Jaafar for any of this. He’s just an actor reciting whatever the screenplay hands him, dutifully hitting the marks the director points at. The problem is the film around him, a bizarre paradox of wasting too much time while somehow having far too much, and trying to speed through it. Around the 40‑minute mark, the whole thing suddenly slams into fast‑forward, as if someone in the editing suite sighed, “Right, let’s wrap this up, I’ve got a lunch break.” Scenes drift by that contribute nothing, padding masquerading as storytelling. Take MJ welcoming Bubbles to the family home: a 30‑second beat inflated into several minutes of cinematic dead air. Or the agonisingly over‑shot moment where MJ dithers over what to call the Thriller album. It’s framed like a tense psychological drama with a deep-in-thought detective trying to piece together intricate clues, pinboard and all, only to reveal, shock horror, that the album will indeed be called Thriller, something that everyone already knows. These scenes drag on with the dramatic urgency of a slightly damp tea towel.

And for what? This is time that could’ve been spent exploring Michael as a human being, conversations with his brothers, his mother (but not Janet, because she’s not in this), the emotional whiplash of becoming the most famous person on the planet, the internal struggles that shaped him. You know, actual insight into the man that the film is supposed to be about, a depth of character. Instead, we get vignettes that say little, do even less, and leave Jaafar Jackson stranded in a film that seems terrified of covering the subject matter.

Michael isn’t a Bad film, but it’s certainly no Thriller. It’s bland, formulaic, and stitched together from every biopic cliché in existence. It’s a Hallmark‑sweet, legally sanitised product shaped by the MJ estate’s protective grip (MJ’s estate lawyer is a credited producer on the film). And of course it will make a bazillion dollars, because MJ fans will watch anything with his name on it. The overzealous fans would hail a two‑hour film of him sitting on the toilet as a misunderstood masterpiece. Some fans will swear blind that Moonwalker and Captain EO were great… which tells you everything. They’ll be happy because the film nailed the Thriller music video or because it pinpointed the smallest details of the Motown 25 bit, with MJ doing the moonwalk while miming to Billie Jean. They won’t care that the man with depth, intelligence, and humanity, whom they claim to be fans of, is ill-represented, one-dimensional, and turned into an empty avatar in what is supposed to be the biopic of his life.

You know how accolade trailers and posters cherry‑pick glowing review quotes? My contribution would be: “Michael: It’s definitely a film that exists.” And that’s the tragedy. Someone with Michael Jackson’s global impact, artistic merit, and deeply complicated personality deserved a film with courage, insight, and emotional depth. Instead, we got a glossy, surface‑level, two‑hour MTV music video, with a fan-service, box-ticking “remember that bit?” narrative.

Still, at least it is better than that awful, 1996, John Travolta-starring Michael film.