This saccharine, reverential biopic about controversial music legend Michael Jackson is about to be one of many worst movies of 2026 – eradicating “the whole lot that is perhaps deemed dramatic”.
It is dangerous. It is dangerous. It is actually, actually dangerous. The brand new Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, is produced by a number of of his relations and shut associates, so nobody anticipated it to be a searing portrait of the controversial star. However it’s nonetheless stunning that they’ve made such a bland and barely competent daytime TV film.
A chronological plod by Jackson’s time within the Jackson 5, and his subsequent solo success, the movie’s narrative stops within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, earlier than he was accused of child abuse, and it removes the whole lot from the story that is perhaps deemed contentious. It removes the whole lot that is perhaps deemed dramatic, too.
What’s left is scene after scene of record-industry bigwigs telling Jackson how amazingly gifted he’s, and of his horrible dad (Colman Domingo, barely recognisable beneath prosthetic make-up) scuttling over like an evil goblin and snarling: “Keep in mind your loved ones, Michael!”
The person himself is performed by his personal nephew, Jaafar Jackson, who should have been solid for his bodily resemblance to the true particular person. He actually wasn’t solid for his skill to specific emotion – not that he is required to do a lot of that.
When he isn’t on stage or in a recording studio, Jackson smiles as he watches tv along with his mom (Nia Lengthy), smiles as he visits sick kids in hospital, and smiles as he buys animals for his non-public menagerie. “They are not my pets, they’re my associates,” he smiles. When he sings Billie Jean, the viewer is left to marvel how this candy and saintly harmless might presumably have written such an pressing, paranoid and sexually charged tune.
