Michael <\/p>\n
\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 <\/p>\n
Director: Antoine Fuqua<\/p>\n
Cert: 12A<\/p>\n
Genre: Biopic<\/p>\n
Starring: Jaafar Jackson, Nia Long, Laura Harrier, Juliano Krue Valdi, Miles Teller, Colman Domingo <\/p>\n
Running Time: 2 hrs 8 mins<\/p>\n
Backed by the kind of production budget normally reserved for resurrected dinosaurs running amok in a theme park, this long-gestating biopic of Michael Jackson<\/a> offers two solid hours of cosplay karaoke. <\/p>\n Somewhere between all four minutes of I\u2019ll Be There and all six minutes of Don\u2019t Stop \u2019Til You Get Enough, you can conjure the corporate meeting that decreed: \u201cLet the music do the talking.\u201d<\/p>\n That may have been for the best.<\/p>\n One shudders to think what the original coda, reportedly reckoning with Jordan Chandler\u2019s allegations against the \u201cking of pop\u201d, would have looked like in a biopic that Jackson\u2019s daughter, Paris, has criticised as sugar-coated.<\/p>\n Between songs, perfunctory scenes demonstrate the tyrannical behaviour of Jackson\u2019s father and manager, Joseph Jackson (Colman Domingo<\/a>, working with nothing).<\/p>\n The star\u2019s siblings appear as an undifferentiated gaggle. Miles Teller and Mike Myers pop up under wigs as the entertainment lawyer John Branca and CBS Records head Walter Yetnikoff.<\/p>\n Various aspects of Jackson\u2019s odd life, including his obsession with Peter Pan, his first nose job and his acquisition of Bubbles the chimpanzee, are sketched in barely-there sequences. All told, there\u2019s only about 20 minutes of dialogue to prevent Michael from being entirely sung through.<\/p>\n