Michael is a film caught between reverence and revelation, and too often chooses reverence.
Written by Sarah Abraham
Antoine Fuqua’s Michael arrives carrying the nearly impossible burden of trying to dramatize the life of one of the most recognizable, yet most complicated, figures in modern history: Michael Jackson. That challenge is perhaps the film’s greatest obstacle from the outset. A life as expansive, culturally significant, and deeply controversial as Jackson’s is difficult to condense into a single narrative, and Michael often struggles under that weight. Rather than anchoring itself to one defining chapter of his life, the film attempts to span decades, moving from childhood through superstardom in broad strokes. The result is a story that far too often feels like it’s checking off historical milestones, drifting dangerously close to Wikipedia-entry-territory, rather than truly interrogating the man at its center.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect is that there are genuinely fascinating films buried within this one. Jackson's childhood of Jackson alone growing up in a family of nine children under an abusive father and loving but devoted mother in a cramped two-bedroom home, being one of them. However, the creative partnership between Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones—particularly the making of "Off the Wall" and "Thriller"—is compelling enough on its own to warrant an entire feature. Their artistic collaboration reshaped popular music forever, and a film focused on that era could have offered rich insight into Jackson’s genius, ambition, and obsessive perfectionism. Instead, Michael repeatedly falls back on concert recreations and performance sequences. While impressive on a technical and performance level, they begin to feel redundant. Audiences already know these songs. We know these iconic performances. What many viewers are searching for is not another recreation of a musical legend, but a deeper understanding of the psychology behind them.
That is where the film feels most safe—and ultimately the most shallow. For a figure whose life was defined by a sense of arrested development, extraordinary talent, trauma, isolation, and contradiction, Michael presents its protagonist in surprisingly sanitized terms. It gestures towards pain, but rarely interrogates it. The film acknowledges hardship, but often frames Jackson almost exclusively as a harmless victim of circumstance. More glaringly, it avoids fully wrestling with the controversies that continue to define how much of the world views him. It is impossible to tell the story of Michael Jackson honestly while pretending those questions either do not exist or deserve only soft framing. Humanizing him does not require canonizing him, and the film’s reluctance to embrace that complexity does neither Jackson nor its audience any favors. The fingerprints of the Jackson estate are difficult to ignore, and here, that creative control feels more limiting than protective.
Even beyond Jackson himself, Michael leaves major pieces of his story underexplored. His brothers—central figures in both his rise and formative years—are barely present, which feels like a glaring omission in a film claiming to tell his life story. Likewise, Nia Long brings warmth and gravity to the matriarch, Katherine Jackson, yet she is given far too little material. There is dramatic depth in exploring why Katherine remained in a household defined by patriarch Joe Jackson’s abuse, and what her silence or survival meant for her children, but the film only brushes the very tip of that territory. Colman Domingo is strong as Joe, but the writing reduces a deeply abusive, narcissistic father into something almost cartoonishly villainous, flattening what could have been a chillingly human portrayal of cruelty and jealousy from a parent.
Still, the film has one undeniable triumph: Jaafar Jackson as Michael. He is genuinely spectacular. What could have easily become imitation instead becomes embodiment. The son of Jermaine Jackson, Jaafar captures his uncle Michael’s essence without reducing him to mimicry, and when he first opens his mouth to speak, the resemblance is so uncanny, the audience at my screening audibly gasped at how exactly he sounds like the pop icon. It’s a remarkable performance with a lot of internalized trauma, one that demands a more daring and more psychologically probing film than the one surrounding him.
In the end, Michael is a film caught between reverence and revelation, and too often chooses reverence. It is watchable, occasionally moving, and anchored by a star-making lead performance—but it is also frustratingly cautious when it should be fearless. For a subject as endlessly analyzed, mythologized, and controversial as Michael Jackson, "safe" was perhaps the one thing this film could least afford to be.
Michael is no plating in theatres.
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