Author: Ty Burr / Source: BostonGlobe.com
“Bohemian Rhapsody,” the rock ’n’ roll biopic about Freddie Mercury and Queen, turns out to be much more fun to think about than actually experience. (The film’s trailer does a great job of selling it, but, um, that’s what trailers are supposed to do.
)The trouble isn’t really star Rami Malek, who gives a mesmerizing if opaque performance as Mercury. The problem is that the movie doesn’t have anything interesting to say. “What on earth is it about?” a secondary character asks at one point about the band’s new single, a genre-bender called “Bohemian Rhapsody.” What the movie’s about, apparently, is a standard rise-fall-rise story.
If you’re ever banged your head on a car dashboard to the glorious operatic absurdity of that title song, of course, you may not care. (Mike Myers, whose “Wayne’s World” character re-popularized our love for Queen’s camp-rock in the 1990s, has a brief and funny turn as a clueless label executive.) And if you’re truly a fan, the highs of “Bohemian Rhapsody” may carry you over the sometimes cringingly generic rock-bio lows.
Most of those highs come in the film’s first third, which doesn’t so much dramatize the band’s ascension to pop glory as whisk us along for the ride. Mercury is introduced in 1970 as an immigrant kid loading baggage at London’s Heathrow airport and nursing secret dreams of fame; his immigrant Parsi parents call him Farrokh, most Brits think he’s Pakistani, and only in his head is he Freddie Mercury.
Not for long. Brazening his way into Smile, a neighborhood rock group headed by guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee, rangy and sane) and drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy), Farrokh announces he’s the group’s new vocalist. “Not with those teeth, mate,” May says, and, in his defense, it’s never clear whether Malek is wearing the prosthetic Freddie Mercury choppers or they’re wearing him. But then May and Taylor hear that four-octave voice.
Malek has cut a curious figure on TV’s “Mr. Robot” and elsewhere; he can use his large, lamp-like eyes and passive demeanor to suggest enigmatic passions roiling beneath the surface. His Freddie is an oddball but a confident oddball, dragging his bandmates along as — according to this movie — he reinvents their name, their sound, and their success.
A six-minute single combining arena-rock guitar riffs…
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