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

[Noodle Lizard]

I remember seeing a trailer for this and thinking it looked laughably crap; typical Hollywood biopic with a bad-wigged actor just talking in Marley motivational poster quotes. So I decided to actually go and see it on a slow night, get out of the house.

It's a bit better than that. Mercifully, it isn't an attempt to go through the bullet points of his entire career like most Hollywood biopics tend to do, instead focusing almost entirely on the recording and success of Exodus. However, it still features many of the typical biopic tropes, the sort of scenes where he'll be sitting around saying "Jah, I could really use a title for this new seminal album I'm writing - wait lads, what's the name of that movie soundtrack you're suddenly listening to down there?"

It also doesn't especially capture the significance of Marley's music, it just sort of tells you how important it is. Marley starts and ends the film as a genius, but it doesn't really bother with the whys and hows. It offers you a few flashbacks to how he got his start and some bits where a bunch of Rastafarians are smoking weed and talking about unity and such, but it was all a bit surface level.

On the plus side, I like that they included and didn't really tone down the Jamaican patois for Western (white) audiences. I thought yer Ben-Adir was decent enough as Marley, but then some footage of the real Marley speaking over the end credits reminded me what he actually sounded like. Mightn't have been a bad idea to have more actual Jamaicans involved, but there you go.

I wouldn't say I was hugely familiar with Marley outside of the songs everyone knows and vaguely remembering that documentary that came out a decade or so ago, so I can't really make firm judgments on how accurate it was. I think there must have been more interesting aspects they could've explored, although the end credits showed that it was basically a film by the Marley estate, so generally the cleanest and most hagiographic representation is going to be the best business decision. Makes for quite a boring film though.

2/5