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To be clear, the point of a biopic is not to provide a direct history of what happened in a person’s life, that’s what a documentary is for. A biopic is designed to offer glimpses into someone’s life and psyche over the course of key moments of their life while editorializing and inferring how they felt or thought about the events with some artistic license. That said, should someone walk into a biopic with little to know knowledge of the subject, they should at least walk out with something resembling the feeling they learned something. This is where Bob Marley: One Love fails because it does not provide much more context than what the viewer brings in with them.
Bob Marley: One Love chronicles the life of iconic musician Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) and his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) as he becomes the most famous reggae musician of all time.
To get the initial issue out of the way, the film is hard to understand because both Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch (and the rest of the cast) adopt thick Jamaican accents and speak within his specific dialect for authenticity. The problem is about half the movie is difficult to understand because of the accents, in the same way, that there are shows set in America where people speak with heavy southern accents, and it's tough to understand. Fortunately, there is context for a lot of what happens, but this difficulty does make some of the emotional moments fall flat because the viewer’s attention is spread across trying to figure out what’s going on and letting the moment resonate.
The biggest other issue with the film is that the historical context for a lot of the internal politics of Jamaica are never really laid out which makes the stakes feel a little weird. A film doesn’t need to lay out every single aspect of a political conflict, it does just have to give a sense, at a bare minimum, about what the fighting is about, or commit to a centrist “both sides are ridiculous and the fight is over nothing” which the film also does not do. This ends up leaving audience members who are unfamiliar with the context in the dark and muddies the situation. It is a fundamental problem that a biopic was made about Bob Marley and his cultural impact while not diving into his activism within Jamaica enough.
Fortunately for Bob Marley: One Love, Spinning Gold came out last year and the biopic about Amy Winehouse is on the horizon so this is not the worst movie about the music industry in recent years, but it is definitely in the bottom half. It is also not the worst movie to come out this week considering it opened against Madame Web. If one is really curious about this film, they could just wait until it hits Paramount+ in the near future rather than going to a theater to watch this film.
Final Rating: 4/10
