Playing it safe, in conjunction with the movie’s portrayal of MJ as a saint, it makes the film feel almost toothless. Where Luhrmann’s Elvis portrays him as a complex character of temper and excess, while still glossing over his wild age gap with his wife and his behavior toward her in general- this biopic avoids controversy, making it feel like it’s running from it.
If you like MJ’s music, this film is for you. The soundtrack is solid. The cast is amazing, Jaafar Jackson is a dead ringer for his uncle and delivers a convincing performance. Coleman Domingo absolutely kills it. Laura Harrier isn’t in it for nearly as long as I wish she was. KeiLyn Durrel Jones is a standout performance and I want to see a lot more of him in the future. Miles Teller has a terrible haircut. It is an overall enjoyable movie for what it is.
But what is happening with this is a big Jackson campaign. Every decision around this film is shaped into exactly that. The movie’s narrative is focused on Michael’s origin and struggle to get out from under his father’s control, ending with independence and the start of his solo career in earnest, because after this, things get messy for the brand.
It was flash and glamor and rage to riches, but it was also sensitive and took the time to flesh out and humanize its major characters as more than “Michael and the Jacksons,” even giving Joe Jackson’s monstrous character some level of sympathetic motivation while firmly displaying that his physical, emotional, and financial abuse of Michael was wrong but it still sands down the hard edges of everything else he was accused of.
If you have the Cliff’s notes version of Michael’s story, I know you started feeling the two hour runtime an hour in, and there are so many interesting stories and encounters in the first half of Michael’s life that would really have kept it from being a “behind the music” style bulleted list from cutting “Off The Wall” to the end of the Victory tour, but I do appreciate the choice to make it a family drama rather than a revolving door of cameos. However, as with any two parter, it is weighed down by its feeling of incompleteness and it wasn’t the movie theater experience I had been expecting when the credits rolled.
Most damning is the way the film handles Michael himself. I came away from the movie feeling that for as much as the movie was about Michael’s exploitation, the movie fell right in line with exploiting his image after his death. For a film about a man fighting for his independence after enduring the horror of child stardom, it didn’t seem to have anything compelling to say with such an interesting and multifaceted topic.
Michael’s character is essentially a 2D passive object in which plot is acted upon. Not that MJ’s life needed to be any more sensationalized, but the film misses almost every chance to dive into Michael’s psyche and create that deeper, insightful, connection to him as a complex human being rather than just a black box experiencing the rest of sainthood and stardom. But of course, we must remember that any deeper look is also a risk. Exhibiting a flaw might tarnish the brand, and the film is dedicated first and foremost to playing it safe. In fact, the only flaw the character of Michael exhibits in this movie is being too nice and kindhearted.
There are a lot of reasons for this film to be the way it is. Michael’s sibling rounding out the majority of the names in the executive producer list is certainly one of them. Jackson’s own private nature probably made it hard for biographers to capture his interiority around the script. The many lawsuits around the movie itself limited which facts of the matter could be displayed all, and too many people with personal stakes had a horse in this race for the movie itself to be anything more than a sequence of events in a timeline delivered one after another and played it safe.
Fuqua had a lot of cooks in his kitchen, I’ll admit. And maybe I am missing the key aspects as someone who’s not an MJ superfan. But for as glossy and slick as Michael’s (2026) production is, it still is just as flat as you’d expect. A familial money grab to be. A great movie for fans of MJ’s music, but just like a televised funeral, I felt weird about the whole thing.
