Movie · 2018 · Music, Drama · 2h 15m · PG-13 · English
Curator score: 3.8/10 (2.4M ratings)
Fearless lives forever.
Overview
Singer Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor and bass guitarist John Deacon take the music world by storm when they form the rock 'n' roll band Queen in 1970. Hit songs become instant classics. When Mercury's increasingly wild lifestyle starts to spiral out of control, Queen soon faces its greatest challenge yet – finding a way to keep the band together amid the success and excess.
Ratings
Curator score: 3.8/10
IMDb: 7.9/10
Letterboxd: 3.50/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 60%
Metacritic: 49
TMDB: 8.0/10
Director
Bryan Singer
Production
20th Century Fox, Regency Enterprises, GK Films, TSG Entertainment
Cast
Rami Malek, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Joseph Mazzello, Lucy Boynton, Aidan Gillen, Allen Leech, Tom Hollander, Mike Myers, Aaron McCusker, Meneka Das, Ace Bhatti, Priya Blackburn, Max Bennett, Dermot Murphy, Dickie Beau, Jack Roth, Neil Fox-Roberts, Jess Radomska, Michelle Duncan
Where to watch
Netflix, fuboTV, Netflix Standard with Ads
Curator Review
Verdict
A glossy, crowd-pleasing jukebox biopic powered by Queen’s music and Rami Malek’s committed central performance, but it smooths over the messier, more interesting parts of Freddie Mercury’s life into a conventional rise-fall-redemption template. It works best as a concert-adjacent spectacle and nostalgia machine, less well as a serious portrait of an artist or a band.
Best for
Queen fans who want the hits staged with maximum polish
Viewers looking for an easy, emotionally direct music biopic
People who prioritize performance and production over historical nuance
Audiences who enjoy big theatrical crowd-pleasers
Skip if
You want a nuanced or boundary-pushing portrait of Freddie Mercury
You are sensitive to sanitized biographical storytelling
You dislike formulaic prestige biopics
You want a film that fully engages with queer identity and AIDS history
Overview
Bohemian Rhapsody is built to be irresistible in the moment: the songs land, the performances are engineered for applause, and Rami Malek gives Freddie Mercury a volatile, magnetic physicality that keeps the film alive even when the script goes rigid. The concert material, especially the Live Aid recreation, is the movie’s strongest argument for its own existence.
Worth noting
But as a biopic, it’s frustratingly cautious. It turns a singular, complicated artist into a familiar awards-season arc, smoothing out conflict and reducing the band’s history to digestible beats. The result is efficient and watchable, but also oddly timid for a story about one of rock’s great provocateurs.
Bottom line
If you come for Queen’s catalog and a star performance, there’s plenty to enjoy. If you want a film with real bite, specificity, or formal imagination, this one stays inside the lines far too often.
Top Letterboxd reviews
SilentDawn (0.5★) · 5675 likes
1"How many times do we need to teach you this lesson, old man?"
Abominable. Chickenshit exploitation of queerness and public persona, in addition to being formally inept. Every single element of this movie is subpar, lacking in nuance and a solid foundation of existence. All of the reaction shots are gold - everyone is lost: in geography, character motivation, respect of authenticity or even some semblance of cinematic coherence. Nothing is even remotely aware of its functionality. The film… more
Josh Lewis (1★) · 4439 likes
Maybe movies were a mistake.
One of the most astonishing, eccentric performers of all time and this is the insipid, formulaic garbage you give him? Any interest in the nuances and artistry of Queen takes a backseat to making their lives and works fit into a Greatest Hits rise and fall biopic; watch as a painfully self-conscious performance stumbles through a barely dramatized Wikipedia overview in between montages of songs you like being simplified into little digestible, lowest-common-denominator origin stories everyone… more
antonio (1★) · 4069 likes
"I don't have time to be their cautionary tale."
Freddie says this to his bandmates when he reveals his diagnosis with HIV. It’s an ironic scene, really, given it takes place entirely because this film turned him into one.
Freddie’s contraction of HIV and eventual death are framed within the film as a tragic inevitability, of which he and his manipulator are to blame. It's his punishment; for his ego, for pushing his band members away. Pushing them away, that… more
Karsten (2★) · 2976 likes
I didn’t watch it again but I just wanted to say this movie is ass.
sophie (2.5★) · 2976 likes
almost knocked it down half a star cause they didn't include when roger taylor locked himself in a cupboard until freddie mercury agreed to make "i'm in love with my car" the b-side