Critics reviews

This movie achieves the impossible in exactly one way: proving you can travesty the already-moribund format of the jukebox musical.

It's not quite a paint-by-numbers biopic—it's has too much fun with the recording and performance scenes to deserve that label—but it's not particularly imaginative, and the fact that it's PG-13 is only part of the problem.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” plods, explains, obscures, speculates and flattens. It does not mesmerize.

This conventional rock biopic by director Bryan Singer is just that. Aside from some exciting music sequences and a fantastic performance by Rami Malek, who almost perfectly channels the magnetic flamboyance of Queen front man Freddie Mercury, the film never quite delivers.

If it has many of the problems we associate with “bad” movies, it has more ragged energy than so many good ones, largely because of Rami Malek’s performance as Mercury, all glitter and muscle and nerve endings.

It’s bad in the way a lot of biopics are bad: it's superficial, it avoids complexity, and the narrative has a connect-the-dots quality. This kind of badness, while annoying, is relatively benign. However, the attitude towards Mercury's sexual expression is the opposite of benign. The tensions of being a gay man in the 1970s are not handled, or even addressed.

A baroque blend of gibberish, mysticism and melodrama, the film seems engineered to be as unmemorable as possible.