Jonah Naplan   February 18, 2024

On virtually every level, “Bob Marley: One Love” misfires, which is an incredible disservice to the singer it’s about and everyone who worked on the movie, too. Faithfully following every musical biopic cliché that’s ever been surmised, the film, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (“King Richard,” “Monsters and Men”), sticks to a strict checklist formula—This happened, then this happened, then this happened, and so on and so forth—highlighting the major bullet points of the star’s career, but never taking a deeper dive into any of them, and completely glazing over the elements of his personal life in turn. This plasticine approach is easy, and any other filmmaker could have done it. We’ve seen very similar examples in movies like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Respect,” “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” “Elvis,” “Selena,” and last year’s godawful “Spinning Gold.” “Bob Marley: One Love” borrows bits and pieces from all of these, but can only manage to distinguish itself as a brazen but empty “greatest hits collection” that takes every little quibble you may have heard about Marley’s professional career and crams it into one movie that runs less than two hours. The result is a film that’s simultaneously too bloated to be thoughtful yet too airy to really make a sincere statement on war, Rastafarian politics, reggae music, or who Bob Marley really was behind the scenes.

It takes place between 1976 and 1978 when Bob Marley was at the height of his fame. Marley, played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, was not only a popular reggae artist but also an active political voice in his home country of Jamaica, where he organized a unity concert called Smile Jamaica aimed at preventing violence between two conflicting political leaders. He has a supportive wife named Rita (Lashana Lynch) and a posse of young children who are either the product of his marriage or one of his several affairs. The film asserts that Marley was something of a folk hero among his community who were looking for a savior to protect them from the horrors of war and violence. Intimidating men with big guns lurk around the residential premises, just waiting for someone to step out of line; and one night, seemingly unprompted, they take shots at Marley and Rita, forcing them to flee the country. Rita and the kids opt for Delaware to live with Marley’s mother, while Bob and his band called the Wailers relocate to London to start work on a new record, one that would go on to become Marley’s iconic Exodus.

The first mistake that director Green and co-writers Zach Baylin, Frank E. Flowers, and Terence Winter make is forgetting to humanize the character of Bob Marley through these early scenes of such urgent, intense emotion. For pretty much the entire runtime, Bob Marley seems less like a real person and more like an elusive, metaphysical force that floats (or rather, bounces) from scene to scene, venue to venue, as if he’s a ghost or an angel or not real. That ethereal intangibility keeps him at a large arms distance away for the entire movie and prevents the audience from grabbing onto and connecting with him as an individual human being, rather than what the media has told us we must think and believe or what’s shown and censored from the past.

A lot of this is evidence of a poor script that doesn’t know how to handle the story of a star this large, but it’s also somewhat the fault of lead actor Ben-Adir who spends the entire film doing just the bare minimum to get by. His portrayal of Marley, especially in big performance scenes, feels overly mechanical, as if he’s directly absorbing and then regurgitating the artist’s movements from a couple of YouTube videos. This is not a performance that seems carefully calibrated or deliberate, while it’s nothing against Ben-Adir who’s proven himself perfectly worthy of good artistry in the past. Here, however, he doesn’t earn the complexity of a man who was clearly easy to love externally or from a distance but difficult to bear with behind closed doors.

All of his successes, both major and minor, seem to manifest practically overnight or through montages that show concert tours throughout Europe or the composition of a new hit song that’s seemingly improvised within five minutes and sent off to a record dealer in the following hour. It’s always all too convenient. Green asserts that Marley surmised the idea for Exodus by overhearing a colleague ogling over the soundtrack of “Exodus” (1960), and came downstairs, picked up his guitar, started strumming a few notes, and BAM there was his song. Every commercial hiccup that either has to do with Marley convincing someone to buy into his creative groove, or creating something revolutionary has that same rhythm; minimalist as much as it is underwhelming.

I suppose it’d be easier to forgive that shortcoming if the film at least felt human, but it does not. The central, tumultuous relationship between Bob and Rita feels overcooked, making for dialogue exchanges that don’t sound like how a real married couple would speak to each other given these circumstances. Lynch is perhaps the most betrayed here, given that you can feel her angry, tortured aura through the screen as you watch her dominate it. She’s clearly trying to make something out of so little, and it’s hard not to commend the effort. Then again, if the movie had more respect for its characters, and didn’t just see them as proverbial chess pieces to be moved around through such a soulless atmosphere, then maybe something truly beautiful, unique, and wholly rare could have unfolded.

Worst of all, I left “Bob Marley: One Love” not knowing any more about Bob Marley than I did going in. While the film does highlight elements of his career—including his generational and worldwide impact as indicated by the end credits—you won’t leave the movie having retained any insight because it’s all told in such a predictable and routine fashion. Bob Marley was great because he brought a certain energy and charisma to all his performances, heightened by something he was fighting for on the other end. This biopic about him could have been more serviceable had it, too, found its own cause to believe in.

Now playing in theaters.