Michael review: Please stop ‘cause I’ve had enough

There is a brief montage early on in this syrupy biopic where viewers see a pre-teen Michael Jackson engrossed in a Peter Pan picture book before, a minute or so later, thrilling to TV images of the significantly more lascivious and carnal dance moves of James Brown.

As shorthand to telegraph the boy/man dichotomy of the singer as a young adult later in the narrative, it’s delivered with something akin to a sledgehammer, but this is a film made by people who appear not to know the meaning of the word "subtle".

Its journey to the big screen has been a rocky one, during which about a third of the initial script depicting the scandals and controversy of the 1990s and beyond was jettisoned, in favour of less contentious, more pedestrian boilerplate biopic tropes.

Michael becomes a child star, he and his brothers in the Jackson Five badgered and bullied by their overbearing father Joe (Colman Domingo), before breaking free to become a solo sensation spouting woolly-headed wisdom, and concluding with the sibling reunion of the mid-80s Victory tour prior to the harder-fought battles that dogged the rest of his life.

Producers and director Antoine Fuqua have hinted that a second film may yet be made to address the sexual abuse accusations and court appearances, but their absence here results in a curiously open-ended, unfulfilling cinema experience - one wag on social media opined it was "like making an OJ Simpson biopic that ends with him getting the script for The Naked Gun".

What little tangible drama there is to the story comes from the scenes of conflict between Michael and Jackson senior, and although Domingo is an irrefutably fine actor he’s working with a screenplay that requires him to do little more than leaf through 'The 'Bumper Book of Volatile Celebrity Dad Caricatures' (see also Stephen Graham in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, or Forest Whitaker as Aretha Franklin’s father in Respect).

Screen time that might have dug deeper into the relationship is sacrificed to keep the focus on Michael and his meteoric rise to the top. The youngster portrayed with cutesy charm by Juliano Krue Valdi, until an awkward dissolve introduces us to the (in theory) grownup version played by Jaafar Jackson, the real-life son of Jermaine.

The family resemblance is evident, of course, although there are times when Jaafar’s mannerisms and demeanour more pointedly recall a doe-eyed, head-tilting Princess Diana, all the more inescapable whenever he’s framed as a saint-like healer of souls.

Michael watches newsreel of riots in urban America, then decides to stem the tide of gang-on-gang violence through the medium of interpretive dance; Michael lights up the lives of burns victim children in hospital; Michael is the most enlightened man on the planet, the storytellers would have us believe.

At least Domingo has something to get his teeth into as the ogre-like Joe, compared to the rest of the Jackson clan; mother Katherine (Nia Long) is written simperingly one-dimensional, while brothers Jermaine, Jackie, Marlon and Tito are nigh-on interchangeable and inconsequential with barely half a dozen lines between them – and everyone involved in the making of film seems to have forgotten he has a sister called Janet.

Key figures outside the family are given equally short shrift. Suzanne de Passe (Laura Harrier), the Motown Records executive who discovered the Jacksons declares Michael has a "God-given talent" after hearing him sing just two lines of a lyric, then leaves before the end of the song; label boss Berry Gordy (Larenz Tate) coaches his future star at an early recording session, but there’s no reference to the fractious split between mentor and moneymaker when Michael jumps ship to a new home at Epic and the creation of mega-hit albums Off The Wall and Thriller.

Epic head honcho Walter Yetnikoff (a broad cameo by Mike Myers) is insultingly served up as a comedy sketch-like Jewish businessman, who phones MTV to demand the station broadcasts Michael’s Billie Jean video or he’ll deny them access to his other star names - in an illustration of the film’s numerous timeline snafus, he specifically mentions an act who wouldn’t sign to the company for at least another year.

And so it goes on, drifting from one underwritten scene to the next, airbrushing incidents and figures integral to them, for fear they get in the way of keeping the spotlight on Michael in admittedly impressively staged musical sequences or, less impressively, mawkish utterances about making the world a better place.

The running time just north of two hours is shorter than many films in cinemas today, but it still becomes a test of endurance, as one over-simplified plot point follows another and Michael’s dialogue increasingly embraces cod Messianic gibberish – to the point where the viewer might cry out, to paraphrase the title of one of Jackson’s biggest hits, please stop ‘cause I’ve had enough.

Michael is released in UK cinemas on Wednesday 22 April.

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