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Michael: Fuqua fails (again)
If Michael proves anything, it’s that even the most mythologized figure in pop history can be flattened into something strangely inert. This is a film that confuses reverence with insight, spectacle with perspective, and ends up orbiting its subject without ever quite touching him. The problem isn’t just the now-familiar Bohemian Rhapsody-style assembly line (you can practically feel the ghost of Bohemian Rhapsody hovering over every montage). It’s that Antoine Fuqua seems fundamentally uninterested in contradiction. And Michael Jackson, of all people, is contradiction incarnate. Instead, we get a sequence of polished surfaces: trauma gestured at, genius asserted, controversy politely diffused. As Mark Kermode once said about another sanitized biopic, “it’s not that the film lies, it’s that it refuses to ask questions.” That line fits here a little too well. There are moments where the film almost breaks free. A rehearsal scene (clearly indebted to the fragmented immediacy of This Is It) briefly suggests a more tactile, process-driven portrait. But then it retreats, as if afraid of demystifying its own icon. Even the much-discussed “dance framing” philosophy (lifted from Jackson’s own interviews) is reduced to a decorative line rather than a structural principle. One can’t help but wonder whether Fuqua actually understands what he’s quoting. International reactions have been telling. French critics, particularly at Cahiers du Cinéma, have reportedly leaned into the idea that the film is “un objet sans regard”; an object without a gaze. In Brazil, some reviewers drew comparisons to the hollow prestige of late-stage Hollywood biopics, noting how the film “performs importance without earning it.” Meanwhile, a few American outlets were more forgiving, praising the central performance while sidestepping the film’s deeper evasions. And then there’s the tonal whiplash. The hospital scene between Michael and his mother plays like it wandered in from Good Will Hunting; a therapeutic crescendo that feels less like character development and more like emotional outsourcing. It’s effective in isolation, sure. But in context, it raises an uncomfortable question: why does a film about Michael Jackson need to borrow its most human moment from somewhere else? The deeper issue is structural. Dialogue rarely breathes; scenes are truncated just as they threaten to become interesting. It’s as if the film is afraid of duration; afraid that if it lingers, something messy or unresolved might emerge. And that’s precisely what a biopic like this should embrace. As Pauline Kael famously argued, great films aren’t about control, but about what escapes it. What’s left, then, is a film that is entertaining, but fundamentally hollow. A museum piece masquerading as a character study. A global icon reduced to a sequence of highlights, carefully curated and quietly defanged. In trying so hard to protect the legend, Michael forgets to observe the man. And without observation; without that elusive, uncomfortable, bioptic gaze: it’s all just choreography without weight.
