Bob Marley: One Love

Bob Marley: One Love
Starring Kingsley Ben-Adir, Lashana Lynch, James Norton, Tosin Cole
Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

Ever since the success of musical biopics like "Straight Outta Compton" and "Bohemian Rhapsody," Hollywood has been clamoring to tell as many stories of famous musicians as they can in order to recapture that same profitability. What we get instead is a string of boring, bland, and Wikipedia-esque storytelling of famous musicians such as Whitney Houston, Tupac, Aretha Franklin and Billie Holiday to name a few. The cinema has become saturated with these formulaic films that don't get as much negative attention as superhero fatigue, mostly because hardly anyone sees them. Now you can add Bob Marley to this unfortunate list with "Bob Marley: One Love" - a film that's hollow, pointless, and doesn't offer any deep insights into the famous Jamaican who made Reggae music instrumental in his quest for peace.

From 1976 to 1978 there was a huge political unheaval in Jamaica led by two warring political factions vying for power, and it's during this time that famed Reggae musician Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) plans a concert to unite the country, even at the risk of his own life. His wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) wants him to proceed with caution, and before the concert some thugs try to assassinate the singer. He goes on with the show but afterward due to worries about his life and the lives of his family, he heads to London with his band while he sends his wife and children to live with his mother in Delaware. While in London he works on his future monumental album Exodus while discovering he's got cancer and only a short time left to live, leading him to do as much as he can to change the world for the better before he leaves this world.


The Good:
Kingsley Ben-Adir is a relative newcomer to the big screen, having appeared most notably in 2023's "Barbie" as one of the Kens and as Malcolm X in "One Night in Miami", but has been a mainstay on television series such as "Secret Invasion." This was supposed to be his breakout role, the role that would make him a household name and grant him a strong and successful future in cinema. While the movie itself let him down, he still gives a strong, committed performance that should be respected against the backdrop of the weak script he was given. You can tell the intensity in his eyes and his heart for the project, and he maintained a hold on the film that would've otherwise completely torn apart without his electrifying presence.

While it seems most films nowadays need to tell an epic story by having it last at least two hours, "One Love" graciously bows out at an hour and forty-seven minutes, but even its shorter runtime it feels like you're sitting through an epic re-telling of the classic novel War and Peace.


The Bad:
Most musical biopics serve as a visual Wikipedia page where you see all the highlights of their career with no in-depth behind-the-scenes drama that happens, and "One Love" is no different. The film begins with Marley already at the height of his career, with only snippets of backstory that point to where he got where he was - a neglected white father, falling in love with Rita, and...that's about it. No word on how he became the man he was, how he was discovered, how his musical and anti-political career got started...nothing. Which describes this movie perfectly: nothing.

The film seems to be bookended by two important concerts Marley gave: "Smile Jamaica" and "One Love," but neither one is highlighted with any importance. "Smile Jamaica" has him singing one song, while "One Love" is cut off at the end with a note card talking about his death. We don't even get to see his dying days or how he handled it, or how he handled anything really. It was superficial to say the least, and an absolute slog to sit through.

The music isn't at all exciting, and they leave out most of Marley's most famous tunes. Only one is played in its entirety, and the rest involves snippets or moments where Marley is supposedly coming up with them in his head, like most musical biopics do. The majority of the film is spent in London where they plan their Exodus album, which consists of several scenes of them sitting in a loft writing songs and recording.

There was much more interesting personal stories involving Bob Marley that was never addressed, most notably his philandering ways. He fathered several different children with at least five different women, and Rita herself had numerous affairs as well. Yet this was never addressed in the movie except a few scenes where you see a woman in the background and no talk about it afterward. It's like the people involved in the project (including Brad Pitt and numerous Marley offspring) wanted to gloss over those darker parts of his life and focus on the positives. Yet even these positives are overshadowed by the mundane story they told instead.

There wasn't even any footage or talk about Woodstock, which is a darn shame.


The Summary:
Following the tradition of the weak musical biopic subgenre, "Bob Marley: One Love" exists merely to tell a superficial story about one of music's most iconic legends - a story you're better off reading on Wikipedia and saving you some time.


The Score: D+