It’s 1985, at the massive Live Aid concert in London, a crucial moment of resurrection for Mercury and the embattled band - which naturally means that before we even hear the first lick, the movie will abruptly cut away to 1970s London, diving headlong into a feature-length flashback showing How All This Came to Be.Īnd at times this “Bohemian Rhapsody,” credited to director Bryan Singer (who was fired during production and replaced by Dexter Fletcher), does stir to a kind of life. You know what you’re in for from the fakeout of a prologue in which Freddie dons a singlet and marches onto a stage in front of thousands of screaming computer-generated fans at Wembley Stadium. (Foster, a fictionalized character, is played by a nearly unrecognizable Mike Myers, in a “Wayne’s World” tie-in that almost but not quite justifies the price of admission.) The irony is that “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a song that triumphantly bucked convention, should now serve as the title of a movie that embraces every cliché in the days-of-our-lives biopic handbook. It’s Freddie who, in 1975, decides that Queen will defy formula and craft a new musical masterpiece that fuses ballad, opera and rock inspirations into an ear-tickling, genre-melding opus for the ages.īut the finished work predictably meets resistance from an EMI Records executive named Ray Foster, who’s convinced that no radio station will play a single that runs six minutes long. It takes just two sentences for “Bohemian Rhapsody” to own itself - no, not Queen’s immortal chart topper, but rather this sprawling, jumbled and disappointingly airbrushed new movie about the legendary rock band and especially its incandescent frontman, Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek).
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