Maybe literally the most cliched movie I've ever seen. As pointed out in David Ehrlich's review, it's baffling that someone could make such a cliched mess of a musical biopic after Dewey Cox blew the genre up. LOL at the way they structured and timed various "arcs" (that were really nothing but check boxes, terribly executed): Mercury meets Mary Austen, meets the band, the existing lead singer quits, Mercury joins the band — all in the same night. Mercury connects with Jim Hutten, comes out to his parents, reconciles with his parents, and plays in Live Aid — all on the same day. Mary breaks through to him, he decides to change, he fires/breaks up with his hanger-on guy — all in consecutive moments — in the rain. LOL. What a mess. He loses his way and breaks up the band family. He falls into drugs. He repents and re-assembles the band for one last hurrah.

Main problem is that the movie offered no insight or theories or explanations or depth — the band just gets together and someone starts riffing on what will become a Queen hit. And in most scenes of the band, the other guys are largely reduced to reaction shots responding to whatever Freddie does or says.

Ludicrous that Malek won an Oscar for this (nor that Oscars matter, but would be nice to see something better rewarded) — his performance was all prosthetic teeth. Granted, maybe he could have given a worthy performance if he had a good script and a consistent and quality director, but he didn't and so the performance was uninteresting. It offered nothing of substance. Didn't capture Mercury's physicality either, IMO. Watch a few minutes of one of his performances and you see a masculinity, however flamboyant, that Malek couldn't really capture. He basically won an Oscar for memorizing and replicating Freddie Mercury's Live Aid performance. But if you're just going to give us the Live Aid scene beat for beat, I'd rather watch the actual rock star doing it.

That said, the Live Aid scene was probably the best part of the movie and was entertaining, but baffling that this made 900 million dollars. It was colorful and slight, but even if it didn't want to try to get under the band's skin or into their minds, it could have been more of a musical, as Rocketman (which looks a lot better — I haven't seen it) seems to be. Not the worst movie ever, thanks largely to the soundtrack, but yet another mediocre, cliched 2010s movie that feels like it came to us from the 90s via timewarp. Have to believe Sacha Baron Cohen's version would have been better.