I did the "whoo."
You know the "whoo." It's the climax of Michael Jackson's 1979 song "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," a pop masterpiece if ever there was one. It's the big crescendo. The guitars scream. The horns blare. In the incredibly low-budget video, three Michael Jacksons dance together. Then the instruments all drop out, and Jackson lets out a wordless howl of pure excitement. It might be more of an "ooh," but in my head it's a "whoo." When that moment arrived in the fucked-up new biopic Michael, I did the "whoo" out loud in the movie theater, right along with Michael Jackson.
I didn't plan to do the "whoo." I don't think I made a conscious decision to do the "whoo." If you came to me yesterday and told me that I would do the "whoo" while watching the instantly notorious bad-idea film Michael, I would've called you a filthy liar and insisted that I would never do such a thing. I am no mere pawn of the Michael Jackson estate. I am a grown man and a published critic, a human being with agency. You can't just dangle these keys in front of my face and turn me into a hooting, infantile Michael Jackson fan all over again. But in that moment, the "whoo" escaped my throat. It just happened. I couldn't hold it in.
I was not the only person who did the "whoo" in the theater last night. In the seats around me, I heard four to six other voices doing the "whoo" at the exact same time as me. Then there was a a slight collective giggle, a moment of mutual recognition. Many of the people in the theater did not do the "whoo." I was there with a couple of friends, including Slate critic Jack Hamilton, and Jack did not do the "whoo." It wasn't a fully unanimous crowd whoop. It wasn't "chicken jockey." But it was a moment.
One might persuasively argue that it's morally indefensible for me to do the "whoo." It's a sign that I have abandoned any sense of critical distance, that I have allowed myself to get caught up in the exhilaration of a movie that functions as pure revenue-generating, reputation-laundering propaganda for the Jackson estate, an advertisement for a back catalog that's already too popular to need such an advertisement. This argument would probably be right! Michael almost certainly should not exist, in its current form or any other! It's a craven exercise that's almost scarily one-sided in its often-baffling storytelling decisions. Unfortunately, I had a great time.
I walked into last night's preview screening slightly inebriated and braced for a flaming trainwreck. The mere idea of a Michael Jackson biopic is absurd. Jackson is a singular figure, both historically and physically. Lots of people can do MJ impressions — it's a whole cottage industry — but absolutely nobody can embody the human being without turning him into a cartoon character. Also, there was never any chance that the film would investigate Jackson's humanity in any substantive way. Jackson's estate controls the rights to his music, and its beneficiaries were only ever going to allow that music to be used in a movie that depicts Jackson as an unambiguous human sunbeam.
When he was near the peak of his fame, Jackson settled one civil lawsuit with the family of a child who accused him of sexual abuse. More kids came forward with allegations, both during Jackson's lifetime and afterwards. His family is extremely invested in the idea that Jackson was a victim of false accusations, and a huge and vocal number of his fans have come to his defense over the years. But that's not the consensus. It's hard to take in all the evidence against Jackson and to believe that he wasn't at least doing some extremely inappropriate things with children. A Michael Jackson biopic that doesn't acknowledge that part of his life is almost like a d4vd biopic that ends before anyone gets murdered. It's ridiculous.
Michael is just such a ridiculous biopic, but the original plan wasn't for it to end before the first accusations came to light. Last year, the news broke: Michael had wrapped filming, but its final act could not legally be shown to the public. As originally shot, Michael was going to have a whole third act where Jackson makes the difficult decision to settle the kid's family's lawsuit even though he's totally innocent. But after filming those scenes, the producers learned that one part of that legal settlement with the family was an agreement that Jackson's estate would never depict his side of that story in a movie. They specifically agreed not to make exactly that movie, and then they tried to make it anyway. I've honestly never even heard of a Hollywood fuckup as egregious as that one.
As a result, Michael needed costly reshoots, and the film's release, originally scheduled for last October, was pushed back for months. Editors needed to use the existing and reshot footage to shape an entirely different story structure, this one about Michael Jackson's struggle to escape the claws of his domineering father Joe. That conflict does not make for a remotely compelling narrative arc. By the time it's over, the movie almost completely dispenses with its storyline. The last half-hour is pretty much just live-concert montage — first the Jacksons finishing up their Victory Tour, then Jackson singing "Bad" in London in 1988. It cuts off abruptly, with three words coming up onscreen: "His story continues..."
God, that ending is so much better than what they had in mind. I cannot imagine the version of Michael that ends with the lawsuit settlement. One of Jackson's lawyers was a guy named John Branca, and he's now the executor of Jackson's estate. Branca is one of the producers of Michael, and the movie holds him up as a kind of secondary hero. Miles Teller plays him, and he wears a feathery wig and very specific makeup. Someone, presumably John Branca, was insistent that they get John Branca's look just right. Whenever he's onscreen, Teller is shot through light that looks AI-softened. If I had to sit through 45 minutes of that guy advising Michael to fight in court to clear his name, I would've peeled my own skin off.
A lot of stuff in Michael feels just as sinister as that planned ending. Throughout, we get scenes of Jackson visiting sick kids in the hospital. Jackson really did that, but the film makes him look saintly, as if only a sicko could read something dark into his fixation on kids. We see him repeatedly reading Peter Pan, and the Peter in the book looks just like '90s Michael. In one part, his plastic surgeon tries to talk him out of a nosejob. His many surgeries are framed as moments of rebellion against his father. It's weird.
Also, sometimes it's terrible. The producers of this movie, for instance, really thought that they could turn Bubbles the chimp into Baby Yoda. They thought they had a beloved pop-culture mascot on their hands, that every kid would want Twister Mat Bubbles under their Christmas trees. There is a lot of CGI Bubbles in Michael. He is the designated comic-relief character. When Michael first arrives at the family home with CGI baby Bubbles, the joke is his family's reaction. They think he's crazy. But when I saw that scene, I thought the movie was crazy for putting it in.
It only gets crazier. Bubbles goes into Michael's bedroom, sees the cover of Off The Wall, and then gets an awed look on his face while pointing at the real Michael. I think he says "ooh," but it really looks like he's trying to say "you" — like he's Caesar learning to talk at the end of Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. Also, there's an extended montage where Bubbles plays Twister. I felt like I was hallucinating. The ape looks terrible, too. You could program a hell of a double feature if you watched Michael back-to-back with Nope or Primate.
It's not just Bubbles. There's a weird AI glow all over Michael. The CGI crowds look abysmal; my friend Jason compared the audiences to the ones in Madden. In the unbelievably hokey scene where Jackson brings rival gang members together at the "Beat It" video shoot, the gang members are all inexplicably 52 years old. Larenz Tate plays Berry Gordy, one of the most ruthless business figures in pop music history, as a warm and protective uncle who disapproves of Joe's abusive tactics, not as one more exploiter in a system full of them. The story skips huge parts of Jackson's story for reasons that are transparently business-related, not creative.
For instance: There's no Janet Jackson in Michael. She does not exist. Nobody says her name once. LaToya Jackson is in there, and the real LaToya has an executive producer credit. But someone else presumably owns Janet Jackson's biopic rights, so this picture simply has to pretend that she never existed. There's nothing about The Wiz, presumably because another studio owns those rights and also possibly because Diana Ross might want her own biopic. We see Michael and Quincy Jones react to Eddie Van Halen's solo on "Beat It," but we don't get the fun and obvious scene of someone in a floofy wig shredding in the studio. My guess is that someone else might make a Van Halen movie.
There's no "We Are The World," even though that would fit right in with the film's chronology and with its messianic portrayal Michael. A scene like that would require the participation of at least a dozen people who probably have their own biopics in development, as well as a handful of others (Tina Turner, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen) who already have movies of their own. "The Girl Is Mine" is one of the only Thriller singles that never appears in Michael, and that's probably because it would conflict with the upcoming Beatles movies with Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney. (I'm also pretty sure that "PYT (Pretty Young Thing)" isn't in the movie, for reasons that are just as obvious.)
The people who made Michael are, for the most part, real filmmakers. Director Antoine Fuqua isn't exactly Hollywood's most consistent auteur, but he has some very fun pictures in his filmography: Training Day, Shooter, all three Equalizers. Screenwriter John Logan is a three-time Oscar nominee with a resume that includes Gladiator, The Aviator, and Skyfall. Cinematographer Dion Beebe shot Collateral and Miami Vice. Colman Domingo plays Joe Jackson, and Nia Long plays MJ's mom Katherine. Joe is the only character in the film who's allowed to be evil, and Domingo, his face buried under makeup, might honestly be too well-known for the role. When he takes out his belt and whips little MJ, I thought, "Well, no, he wouldn't do that, Colman Domingo is so nice." These are real filmmakers, but they are not here to make a real film. They are here to play the hits.
But this is the important part: The hits get played. The Michael scenes with no music are rough. They will test your endurance. But those scenes are not the majority of the film. Instead, music pulses all through this thing. It plays out as one long montage, with occasional unfortunate interruptions. Fuqua and his collaborators know why people might want to see this movie. They treat Jackson's first moonwalk like it's Captain America picking up Thor's hammer. In my theater, that's how it played.
I haven't yet mentioned Jaafar Jackson, the actor who plays the adult Michael. Jaafar is Michael's nephew, Jermaine's son, and this is his acting debut. He is not really an actor, and I can't imagine he'll ever play a major role other than Michael Jackson. In dramatic scenes, he's fully inert. He does Michael's speaking voice all through the movie, and there was a mutter all through my theater when we first heard it. It's not fun to hear someone talk like that for two hours. But Jaafar looks like Michael Jackson, and he moves like Michael Jackson — two things that are basically unthinkable. Fuqua uses Jaafar to restage countless iconic Jackson moments, and the moments of performance are absolutely electric. Parts of Michael are so good that I couldn't believe what I was seeing, just as parts of Michael are so bad that I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
We don't get to Jaafar Jackson for a while. A kid named Juliano Krue Valdi plays the young Jackson 5-era version of Michael, and he's a revelation. He brings the heartbreaking sincerity that still pops off the screen in old Jackson 5 footage, and he can act, too. It's an absolute blast to see the old variety-show performances painstakingly recreated on a giant screen, and the thrill doesn't dissipate when the movie gets to grown-up Michael.
We see Jackson on the set of the "Thriller" video, telling the cameraman to make sure to keep his entire body in the frame, and then we see him doing the dance, with his entire body in the frame. We see him howling at the sky in a jet of steam. We see the three Michaels dancing together and doing the "whoo!" We even get multiple scenes of him smiling while eating popcorn, like in the gif. Even some of the tragedies, like the Pepsi ad shoot where Michael's hair catches on fire, play out mostly in musical-montage form.
In my theater, people were amped. They sang along. They stomped. During dramatic scenes, they loudly voiced assent or dissent with whatever the characters were saying, like they were in church. Despite all the clumsy shots of Michael Jackson bringing together diverse fanbases, this is a film made primarily for Black audiences. It has pauses built into its dialog, seemingly specifically so that people can vocally respond to what they're hearing. If you have the option to see it in a predominantly Black theater, that's the way to do it.
The whole time that Michael was playing in front of me, I knew that I was being manipulated for nefarious purposes. Most of that time, I did not care. If you don't care about Michael Jackson's music or iconography, there is absolutely no reason to go see Michael. On its own merits, it's barely a movie. But if you do love his music — if you grew up with it, if it's part of your being — then Michael is pure and effective fan service. I had a great time.
I did not expect to have a great time. On the contrary, I was dreading this movie. The story of the production wasn't just the kind of Hollywood farce that you'd see in The Studio. It seemed to be evidence of actual evil. The existing film is not the one that the producers intended to put onscreen, and thank god for that. It still emits evil vibes. Can you enjoy a movie that radiates evil? I can. Dirty Harry? Red Dawn? Bangers. Parts of Michael are so strange and inept that they feel like fever-dream visions, but when everything is humming, it's a banger, too.
Why are you reading this review? You know how you feel. If you detest Michael Jackson, if you see him as an Epstein-esque avatar of unaccountable abuse and corruption, then this film will horrify you. If you are a Jackson defender who truly believes he was innocent, then this movie was made for you, and you are probably already going crazy in the mentions of all the critics who didn't like it. Congratulations to you.
I don't represent either of those groups. I'm among the masses who love Michael Jackson's music and who think he was probably a monster. I can't let the music go. It's part of me. I also can't pretend, as the film does, that the person who made this music was a pure, blameless force of light in the universe. Michael is not the Michael Jackson biopic that gives a full, unvarnished view of a human being who lived a life of great and tragic and consequential contradiction. That biopic will never exist. Instead, Michael is a cursed cultural object, and it's also a fun night out at the movies. Make your decisions accordingly.
