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Where does a preening, pansexual rock god get his powers? The Freddie Mercury biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody" traces his sonorous majesty to an unlikely place: his back teeth.
Mercury, nee Farrokh Bulsara, was born with four extra incisors, giving him a bigger mouth. Introducing himself to his future Queen bandmates Mercury, as played by Rami Malek, explains that the chompers have provoked beyond a provocative, pronounced overbite. It endows him with enhanced vocal range.
Teeth-assisted or not, Mercury's voice was so expansive that it prompted a genuine scientific inquiry. But Bryan Singer's "Bohemian Rhapsody," has a slavishly-rocking slap on the back of the head. It's a remarkably bland movie about a deliciously vibrant performer.
Yet while "Bohemian Rhapsody" is so hollowly, even comically formulaic that even Dewey Cox of "Walk Hard" might be snicker, it's filled, often fantastically, by Malek's sinuous, fully uninhabited performance as the Queen frontman. It's as if he did not get the note about the half-hearted filmmaking going on around him, or if he did, he's hell-bent on ignoring it.
Malek, the "Mr. Robot" actor, throws himself into every second strutting of Mercury. He lacks both Mercury's voice and Mercury's teeth (Malek was outfitted with fake ones). But Malek's performance, especially on stage, is so full-bodied that he transcends both his own differences and Mercury and the tepid surrounding melodrama.
That "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a bit of a surprise surprise. Singer was fired towards the end of the day and was replaced by Dexter Fletcher. Singer remains the credited director; Fletcher is listed as a producer.
The script, too, underwent several passes by Anthony McCarten ("Darkest Hour, The Theory of Everything") The film opens moments before Queen's Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in 1985, and – as if by rock biopic Freddie, in his mid-20s and living with his parents in London suburbs.
Mercury was born to a Parsi family from Zanzibar, but we only got the slightest of hints of his family heritage or what made Mercury run from it. By the time we meet him, he has not yet adopted his Roman god moniker (more than a stage name, he made "Mercury" legal), but he might as well have. Young Freddie is already a larger-than-life figure in a life of skin-tight jumpsuits and glam-rock anthems. Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) drummer Brian May (dr Hardy) that he's their new lead singer.
Everything in "Bohemian Rhapsody" happens with the thrust of life and the rapid-fire recounting of a biographical history, sometimes rigorously in step with Wikipedia, sometimes taking shortcuts to avoid anything that strays outside a neatly contrived narrative. In the span of minutes, Queen is a sensation with a record contract (Mike Meyers joins for a tongue-in-cheek cameo with EMI executive Ray Foster) and aspirations for much more: a world tour, a far-out concept album and beyond . Our sense is that Mercury has swiftly – and with curiously little trouble – realized his true self, in all his peacocking glory.
The conflict, hinted at passing glances in between recording sessions, is that Mercury, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1991 at 45, is not quite so far off, but all its radical flamboyance. Mary Austin (Lucy Boyton), Paul Prenter (Allen Leech), who gets most of the blame for anything bad Mercury ever did.
But the film mostly sticks to the familiar trajectory of rock stardom: magic studio, backstage excess, band infighting, misguided solo efforts, drug problems and – that most heinous of threats in the music biopic – the temptation of disco.
The only time "Bohemian Rhapsody" works when it is finally retrieved from the standard biopic narrative but from storytelling altogether. It concludes with almost all the songs of the band's reunion show at Live Aid which, despite the movie's fudged timeline, took place two years before Mercury's AIDS diagnosis. Still, the power comes alive from the tunes and from the Mercury / Malek's magnificent stage presence. "Bohemian Rhapsody" might be easy come, easy go, but Malek makes for a show-stopping silhouetto of a man.
"Bohemian Rhapsody," 20th Century Fox release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for thematic elements, suggestive material, drug content and language. Running time: 134 minutes. Two stars out of oven.
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Follow AP Movie Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
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