Despite film critics reacting to it with all the horror of finding a ball of hair in their soup, the Michael Jackson biopic is a hit. And not just financially, though the $217m (£160m) it made worldwide this weekend will certainly be making investors happy. What’s really significant is that people like it, with audiences polled in recent days at US cinema screenings giving it an overall A- grade. Over on the review-collating site Rotten Tomatoes, the veritable online battleground du jour that plays host to unbothered critics and furious fanboys, Michael currently sits at 40 per cent “rotten” when professional reviews have been totalled, but 96 per cent “fresh” per the Jackson acolytes voting with their clicks. Never has the gulf between the supposed critical elite and the men and women on the ground been quite so stark.
Michael has been framed as a bit of a referendum on Jackson’s public image, a reputation that’s been distorted and dented over the years, if not fatally. It feels a bit unfair: Michael is squeaky clean by design, charting Jackson’s childhood in the suburbs of Gary, Indiana, his difficult relationship with his father and manager, Joe, and his ascent to superstardom. We meet Bubbles, Jackson’s primate bestie, and watch as he buys himself board games, comforts sick children, makes the “Thriller” video, and wows Wembley. He is practically saintly; a lovely albeit lonely man who blessed us with the gift of his music and did absolutely nothing else, your honour. And because the film ends in 1988, with Jackson on top of the world, all the weirdness of Jackson’s later life – from the child sex abuse allegations first made against him in 1993, to his bizarre marriages to Lisa Marie Presley and Debbie Rowe, to the increasing surreality of his augmented face – is left off-screen. A sequel has been threatened. God knows how that’ll work.
