Movie Review | Michael

Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson (Photo –
Glen Wilson/Lionsgate)

“Fairy Tales” are the first words spoken by the adult version of Michael Jackson in Michael, and before I left the theater after the long credit roll, I read the next-to-last scrolled legal disclaimer: “Events have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes.”

Michael
Directed by Antoine Fuqua – 2026
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan

Truer words have never been clipped and pasted.

Somewhere between the opening and ending is a movie, a biography that is both compelling and shifty in its presentation. Compelling for the music parts: the singing and dancing—in particular, the “Thriller” video—are its best moments, and watching them makes it easy to understand how the film is enjoying its popularity.

But there’s the shifty part. Unlike other musical biographies I’ve seen lately—those that at least try to allude to their subjects’ personal issues (drugs, sexual orientation, etc.)—Michael presents its subject as a kind of Bambi thrust into the cutthroat world of music. To be sure, as the film’s earlier sequences make plain, Michael Jackson didn’t have much of a childhood. But while Jaafar Jackson, in the title role, expertly mimics the dance moves, his acting doesn’t radiate an inner pain, and his lines are spoken in a largely uninflected, almost zonked manner.

And those lines! “I’m not a kid anymore,” “I’m taking control of my destiny,” “I just want to do my own thing.” As I jotted down these banalities, I recalled a quote from Gil Scott-Heron’s “B Movie” song: “Clichés abound like kangaroos courtesy of some spaced-out Marlin Perkins.”

The film locates its dramatic nexus in the tension between Michael and his controlling father, Joe Jackson (played by Colman Domingo, who, while stuck in the role of the Big Bad Wolf, still manages to give the film’s only compelling performance), while the Jackson brothers are largely in the background, sister LaToya is barely mentioned, and Janet Jackson is an Orwellian unperson, airbrushed out of the family’s filmed history.

To be sure, there are some interesting historical tidbits, as when lily-white MTV is blackmailed into playing Michael’s video, a touch of the authentic that the film could have used more of, instead of the repeated performances that, after 90 minutes, begin to take on an oddly holographic detachment, a play of light and shadow, especially in the 1988 London concert, after which I waited for the film’s third act.

There was none, however, only the message HIS STORY CONTINUES (whatever that meant) and the credit roll.

I was told or shown nothing of the last twenty years of his life: no drugs except the mention of Demerol, and none of the other weirdness that came with Michael’s Neverland retreat. I did wonder if the repeated scenes of young women fainting dead away at that last concert re-creation and being hauled off like corpses were perhaps a sneaky metaphor for Michael’s decline and fall, though maybe I was just grasping at straws.

It was that kind of movie.

> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, Regal Paseo, Regency Academy Cinemas, IPIC Theaters, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, AMC Santa Anita 16, Regal UA La Canada, and Laemmle Glendale.