Bob Marley: One Love (2024)

Bob-Marley:-One-Love-(2024)
Bob Marley: One Love (2024)

“Why bother?” It’s a question that I kept asking myself in the course of watching what seemed like the endless suffering that is ‘Bob Marley: One Love,’ which is a pale biopic with neither any truly interesting insight nor any sense of creativity. This follows a long trail of music juvenile tales that seem intended more at re-marketing old records that focus on the new cover artwork. For all the vices that characterize insipid movies like “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Whitney Houston’s,” at least these had some pretense when it came to the artist who wears the crown. ButCheryl Ducat’s far-fetched script and slapdash editing make a mockery of the artist, Marley, to the extent that his name is associated with defects in the jukebox record.

The blame could easily be placed on Reinaldo Marcus Green, the film’s director. Although he displayed a glimmer of potential in his first film, “Monsters and Men,” that was soon followed by the weak, iced-over tale of “Joe Bell.” He can be forgiven for that bad miss, after all, he was late to the project. But then he was the director of ‘King Richard,’ an over-the-top sports family drama that won Will Smith the Oscar for Best Actor, even as it gave over its essence to clichés.

Green again indulges his tendency to appeal to large concepts of pain and suffering and the same paper-thin notions of actual human beings that felled him before. ‘One Love’ On May 26, 2021, Green released Faizon Love in Enterprises’ One Love studio run by Marissa.

However, if Green is the subject of the lion’s share of the blame, he is not alone in this travesty. The film’s first draft was created by Green in collaboration with Terence Winter, Frank E Flowers, and Zach Baylin. It is a horrifying, incoherent sequence of happenings executed with the finesse of bullet points.

The narrative stretches from the years 1976 to 1978 Marley, who has already proclaimed himself a prominent political figure, is promoting a show to reduce the violent hostilities between two opposing politicians. Almost immediately, we are introduced to Marley’s extended family he fathered a number of children through both his wife and various relationships, as the film emphasizes his partner Rita (Lashana Lynch), his scheming manager Don Taylor, and some members of his staff, including the Wailers band. Since the family lives in a compound protected by high walls and armed security, there is already an impression that Marley has constant death threats. We also find out that he’s fond of jogging and playing soccer. And that’s about it.

For a while, the film lulls you into believing that it tells a story about the Smile Jamaica concert.

Sadly, the gig seems to be sped up for time purposes as it feels as if the creatives don’t want to go further than 10 minutes of silence without music being played. The audience has no grasp of Marley‘s life as a musician, what was going on politically in the streets, or even what his spouse, Donald, and Rita who played an important role before an assassin (Michael Ward – an actor who has zero potential) shoots them, and the sick team has to escape. Marley Wailers settled in London where they started to perfect a new record. The rest of the family goes to live in Delaware with Marley’s mother. She is American, but how she could be here is never really explained and she is almost never seen on screen.

In “One Love”, the words have a way of filing away the soft curves of the anticipated narrative to leave behind hard edges that will rock the viewers. Overused flashbacks quickly retrieve Marley’s hard-knock beginnings times with a racist but predominately white father who was not present- so they get us the Wailers and Marley’s parental nurturance, Who marries Rita and gets the recording deal very quickly. It all feels as oozy as the sick love lighting used by Robert Elswit’s Dp.

In the dull clips in the studio, the viewer already imagines that the film will be about the recording of Exodus, Marley’s record There are rapid renditions of the title song of the album and of super hits like ‘Jammin’ which deal with normal frame stereotypes of shooting a score wherein in the middle of it, the song is written within seconds. When Marley walks in on the Wailers watching the video which has the song ‘Exodus’, he insists that it shall be the title of the album. Imagine the consequences; before you know it, they are wow on a Europe tour.

At no moment during the music biopic, however, somebody feels curiosity about when or whether ‘One Love’ is somehow going to be about Marley’s politics, his Rastafarian religion, or reggae at all. Instead, Green saddles everyone with bad wigs and worn-out lines against nasty backgrounds while motivational songs are overshadowed by stupid bleeds. Towards the end, for example, Marley is surrounded by his children who form a circle around the campfire and watch him as he strums acoustic and sings “Redemption Songs” which of course gets them excited as they stare at the flickering flames.

No actor in the film is immune to the bland philosophy Ben-Adir, it has to be said, goes very far in mimicking the icon from the start to the end of the scene, but in the real concert he is distant from the natural flow of performing, rather it resembles a person repeating moves in mechanical fashion.

The remote styling of the shows, a combination of distant media does him no good either. It’s all rather dull. Overemotional soliloquies reanimate the usually captivating Lynch of her appeal. “Sometimes the messenger becomes the message,” she tells Marley with such devotion to the role that her unfortunate lines seem unworthy of her. In Marley’s narrative, Rita is typically seen treading water, popping in mostly to provide tedious background information or advice so that a marriage that the film fails to portray can at least have her words explain what it’s meant to be. There is no insight as to why Marley and Rita seemed to have such an attraction towards one another and how they managed to be so powerful despite Marley’s affairs.

Before the screening started, Ziggy Marley’s video message was shown during the introductions: He vowed that an “authentic portrayal” of his father would come in the film. In art, I have no sympathy for sincerity, such an expression implies the existence of a single and unvarying reality which is precisely what the term implies. I would rather see an honest depiction, a film that seeks to portray the intricacy of a person and the mess of their life. “One Love” doesn’t have that kind of rhythm, spark, and life the kind that was responsible for the bounce in Marley’s soulful music.

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