Bob Marley: One Love is a biopic of the unforgettable reggae star directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and starring Kingsley Ben Adir as Bob Marley. This film is essentially a biopic that covers Marley’s life from his early childhood, his short career, marriages and ultimately passing away in 1981. Additionally, Lashana Lynch and James Norton play important supporting characters.
I will confess that I do not know a lot of things about Bob Marley. In truth, I do appreciate some of his music but I wouldn’t go as far as putting myself in the category of a zealot of his music. For me, it is just a case of liking some of his songs that I catch on the radio whenever the songs come up, which isn’t all that often. Still, I went into this movie wanting to learn more about the man. More importantly, the person and how it was that this person not only impacted the music world but the entire world in some ways considering that he became famous when tempestuous scenes occurred in Jamaica if history serves me right. It is a fine line that one has to tread when it comes to musical biopics in this day and age and now the time is to check if this motion picture succeeds in changing the perception of such a motion picture genre whose scenes are surprisingly easy to put together but difficult to avoid being run of the mill.
A positive first impression would be to state that Adir and Lynch are the major highlights as far as the acting is concerned. Once again, Marley is not someone I’m familiar with, nor do I think that Adir’s performance is going to go down in history as the most accurate depiction of the musical legend, but what I do know is that it’s a decent portrayal, if viewed from a purely acting perspective. Come this time next year, they won’t be snatching any awards.However, there are times when the viewers can see that Adir is really in love with this part. You can sense where he is trying to capture Marley’s never ending call of love and change. A few more of the emotional core punch moments are also given by Lashana lynch that stand out as well and she shows that she can go toe to toe with a Kinglsey Ben-Adir whom I do think is a spectacular star in the making.
The strongest scenes of this autobiographical film commendably feature musical scenes where Marley is shown performing as a true musician. I do however have to stress that there were fewer numbers of musical scenes than I expected and the movie’s lack of a magnificent performance scene like Bo Geman Rhapsody’s live aid was a bit of a let down. Nonetheless though, the musical scenes in this film are enjoyable. The music was good as well and there was a nice blend of old recordings of Marley and tape of Adir singing a lot of the music. It was quite easy to get carried away, my foot tapping away as I watched how some of these songs were created.
But now onto the negatives, it disappoints me to say that this movie can’t quite escape some of the conventional negatives that many Common Threads Of Biopics the Industry Ya Ba Di Pa Di Biopics. First and foremost, the pattern is rather standard and the film does nothing over the course of the now standard portrayal of the developments which culminate up to fame and all that comes afterwards. However, for this particular movie, the concern is with the editing and pacing of the movie. There was a painful lack of chronology to the story. One adult Marley’s scene will quickly be interrupted by a flashback to his childhood, which is a popular theme in the chronics. The narrative simply skips around to various episodes in Marley’s life, None of it felt concentrated. If only I could manage to piece together how the movie was attempting to connect the dots regarding certain moments from his past and their relation to things that happen in future I could have managed to present something a little more lucid than how jumbled it is.
To put it plainly, I think watching him maneuver through his career while his home country was undergoing political unrest was far more captivating than the portrayal of his childhood which seemed rather irrelevant to the deeper context of the story.
Another huge issue pertaining to the movie is how it gives off the impression that it is incomplete. The scenes that I really paid attention to were the scenes centered around Marley and Rita, his wife. There’s one moment in particular where they get into this huge fight supposedly out of nowhere and I had no clue what the problem was. It was not apparent from much before that this fight had any premise and that it was a result of built up tensions in their marriage. It really looks and feels like it is just made to have a big fight in the movie and I did not understand how that had come to be a problem. Such problems are pretty common throughout the movie and it also explains why Marley’s rise to fame seems a little abrupt. Like with a lot of moments in this movie, they just kind of happen like that and the movie does not appear to bother to elaborate further.
As I’ve already indicated, the film does indeed suffer from a lack of focus. True, I did get to learn a new thing or two about Marley but after watching the movie, I went – I must say, rather disappointingly and found this film barely scrapes the bottom of the barrel of some of its themes. The historical context that I am mostly referring to is the one that seemed like it was embedded throughout Marley’s career and I thought it would’ve been interesting to witness that. But the film does not entirely follow through on it and so they don’t get the sense that the most we get out of it is not from the movie itself but rather some archival footage that is interspersed throughout the film, as if the entire struggle was just an afterthought. And the way in which Marley’s story goes was never compelling enough because this film was solely focused on his life to make me want to see more of him in comparison to other socio political issues that existed within the same time frame.
In general, Bob Marley: One Love has many powerful performances by its two leads as well as some engaging musical numbers, but these are insufficient to change the fact that, among other things, it simply feels like another one of those biopics that are about a musician and that really don’t need to have been made in the first place. I honestly thought that after seeing the film I might as well skip the movie and just read a Wikipedia article on Bob Marley’s life while playing his music in the background at home. It is not a bad film, but regardless, it is also just another biopic that works around the template and offers little substance concerning the subject matter.
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