You’ll Want More
As anyone who has gone to the multiplex recently—and not many of you apparently have, to judge by the box-office numbers—can tell you, 2024 has thus far not been a particularly strong period for filmmaking thanks to such blessedly forgettable duds as Mean Girls, Argyle, Lisa Frankenstein and this week’s Madame Web. However, Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Bob Marley: One Love just might be the biggest disappointment of the lot because it takes what should have been foolproof material—a biopic covering the life and work of reggae legend Bob Marley—and gives it the kind of sloppy, lackadaisical treatment that comes perilously close to making Bohemian Rhapsody seem focused and committed by comparison.
Like a number of recent biopics, the film elects to cover just a short portion of Marley’s life, in this case, the period covering 1976-78. It begins with Bob (Kingsley Ben-Adir) attempting to put on a peace concert in Jamaica designed to ease tensions between two warring political factions, continuing on with it even after an assassination attempt that wounds him and puts wife Rita (Lashanna Lynch) in the hospital. From there, he retreats to London to join with his band the Wailers to record the smash album Exodus and embark on a tour of Europe that sees him hobnobbing with the superstar set and playing a now-legendary gig at London’s Rainbow theatre. Eventually, he is compelled to return to Jamaica with the dream of putting together a free concert for peace and unity, despite facing the diagnosis of the cancer that would cut his life short at the age of 36 in 1981.
In theory, focusing on one particular period means that the film can cover that particular era in more depth, presumably allowing them to get to the heart of what they want to say about their subject, without being forced to hop blindly from one event to the next in an attempt to compress an entire life into 120 minutes. And yet, Green (whose previous films have included such true-life misfires as Joe Bell and King Richard) and his three co-writers have somehow managed to create a narrative that does exactly that. We jump from event to event—along with the occasional meaning flashback—but we never get any sense of what they are trying to say about Marley and his legacy with them—the events depicted are presented in such a haphazard fashion that you get the sense a lot of additional material got removed at some point during the production and no effort was made to make what remained into some kind of organic whole.
No doubt in an effort to secure the approval of the Marley family—not to mention the all-important rights to use his songs on the soundtrack—any complexities that Bob had in real life are effective stripped away, giving the film a hagiographic feel that comes across as both shallow and vaguely condescending. Right from the start, he is looked upon by practically everyone in his orbit—even the guy who shoots him and then later returns to beg for forgiveness—in frankly saint-like terms and while I can understand why the Marley family would want to see him portrayed in such a way in order to further burnish his legacy, it certainly doesn’t help the film from a dramatic perspective. (There is a scene in which Bob sings his classic “Redemption Song” as his children slowly gather around him in dewy-eyed adoration that is so sugary-sweet that it is practically nauseating.) Of course, the one time that the film deigns to show him in more human terms—an acknowledgement about his numerous infidelities—it comes from out of nowhere and is then swept under the rug so quickly and completely that it is almost laughable.
Ben-Adir is a strong and undeniably charismatic actor but you would not pick that up from hs work here. Jammed into a fairly unconvincing dreadlock wig, he is more or less able to replicated Marley’s onstage moves but only in a purely mechanical sense—there is never any sense of the passion and intensity that Marley brought to his music. In the offstage scenes, he continues to simply go through the motions, never giving us any real sense of who Marley might have been beyond the guy on the album covers. Likewise, Lynch (whose equally unconvincing dreadlock wig ends up being the center of the film’s biggest unintentional laugh) has that one outburst when Rita calls Bob on his infidelities but is otherwise kept so much to the sides that we never get any real sense of who she is, either to Bob or herself.
What is ultimately the worst thing about Bob Marley: One Love is the sheer indifference and lack of curiosity that it displays to both the man and his work. Instead of giving us a look at Marley, warts and all, that properly conveyed the combination of artistic and social commitment that continues to resonate decades after his passing, all we get is a bottom-of-the-barrel jukebox musical-drama produced with all the passion of a posthumous greatest hits album cobbled together by suits trying to cram as many familiar tunes into the mix as possible. Trust me—you could sit at home and blast your copy of Legend while staring at the cover for two hours and you will come away with a greater feel for who Bob Marley was and what he meant to so many than you will watching this nonsense.