A musical biopic about a monumental pop star is a whole lot of spectacle that spends too much time with the familiar beats and too little time allowing us to feel the impact of his journey and his discography. Every character feels one-note or like a simple vessel to move plot points forward, even Michael himself. Jaafar Jackson commits himself to Michael’s amazing stage presence and dance moves, but the movie doesn’t allow us to feel much for Michael as a person outside of his circumstances and talent. Colman Domingo is excellent as Michael’s emotionally cold, controlling, and abusive father Joseph, but the film spends way too many repetitive scenes trying to show us that Michael desparately needs to break free from Joseph and pave his own way forward.

Any other theme this movie attempts to go for feels painfully underdeveloped, whether his rise to fame, health issues, activism, or the trails he blazed for black representation in mainstream arts. The things that are special to this musician are touched on briefly, while the movie instead insists on hitting all the familiar beats we’ve seen in countless music biopics. The real star here is the sound design, which dials everything up to an 11 during the concert and performance scenes and make us feel immersed in them. That unfortunately only encompasses about eight minutes of Michael‘s 127-minute runtime, which feels incomplete and like the team in the editing room had an hour they should’ve cut and far more story that could’ve already been told.

Though Michael Jackson’s songs moved the Earth and changed the course of the world, the movie doesn’t reach deep enough into the magic of his music and the work that was put around it. The film seems interested in making the case that he is indeed the greatest popstar of all time but clueless as to how to convince us, even those of us who already believe it, instead presenting us with a few of those extraordinary moments from the King of Pop’s life, while the drama offers frustrating lack of nuance that becomes more and more tedious. This missed opportunity of a film that tries a whole lot of everything with not much of it sticking at all. We should’ve been soaring with the hits and left better understanding the human being behind the legend, instead we feel like we’re interacting with caricatures, and then one of the greatest songs of all time starts playing every now and then.