Michael Review

The performance is not the problem. Jaafar Jackson has his uncle's carriage, the shoulders, the way the head snaps a beat behind the foot, and the Motown 25 recreation of Billie Jean is a genuinely great few minutes of filmmaking: it is the one stretch where the film stops explaining itself and simply watches. The Thriller video shoot has the same appetite. So does the sequence built around Beat It and the rival gang members brought onto the set.

Everything around those set pieces has been sanded flat. John Logan's script once covered the molestation allegations. The studio and the estate backed away, reportedly spending fifteen million dollars on reshoots to replace the last third, and what is left is a film that simply stops before the part of the life everybody in the cinema is thinking about.

You cannot make a serious picture about Michael Jackson while agreeing in advance not to raise the subject, and the omission drains the earlier material too, because the childhood scenes with Colman Domingo's Joseph are clearly being laid in as explanation for something the film will not name. Domingo is excellent and stranded. Miles Teller and Mike Myers are doing music business impressions in a boardroom.

Critics were brutal, under forty percent on the aggregate and a Metacritic in the thirties. The public did not care in the slightest: an A minus CinemaScore and more than a billion dollars worldwide, the biggest biographical film ever released. A concert movie with two hours of Jaafar and no script would have been better.