Michael arrives with the weight of myth already crushing its shoulders. This is not just another music biopic, nor even simply the latest attempt to turn a global icon into awards-season prestige. It is a film about one of the most famous, gifted, controversial and commercially untouchable figures in modern pop culture — and that means every creative decision, every omission, every note of sympathy and every act of evasion lands under a harsher spotlight than it would for almost any other screen biography.
What Antoine Fuqua’s film appears to understand, at least in flashes, is the scale of Michael Jackson as a performer. By most accounts, Jaafar Jackson is the film’s great coup: not merely a lookalike novelty, but the animating force that gives the project its pulse. His performance has been widely praised for its physicality, movement, stage presence and uncanny ability to channel Michael Jackson’s public magnetism without collapsing into parody. That matters, because for a film like this to work at all, the centre has to hold. On that count, Michael seems to have found its king.
And yet, embodiment is not the same thing as interpretation. That is where Michael appears to falter.
The problem, if the early critical consensus is any guide, is not that the film lacks polish. It is that it may have too much of the wrong kind. Biopics like this can survive simplification if they bring urgency, perspective or emotional danger. But the loudest complaint surrounding Michael is that it too often plays like an estate-approved monument: handsome, reverent, carefully constructed and deeply reluctant to wrestle with the contradictions that made its subject both adored and contested. Several reviews have described it as sanitised, dramatically cautious or structurally formulaic — a polished procession through familiar beats rather than a truly searching portrait of a singular, damaged, astonishing artist.
That criticism cuts to the heart of what audiences tend to want from a major music biopic now. The genre has evolved. It is no longer enough to recreate the wardrobe, hit the choreography and move briskly from childhood trauma to global superstardom. Viewers expect a point of view. They expect the film to say something meaningful about fame, power, exploitation, reinvention, loneliness or the cost of becoming a brand so large that the human being inside it starts to disappear. Michael, at least from the first wave of responses, seems strongest when it stages the phenomenon and weaker when it interrogates the man.
That is a particular shame because the material is inherently rich. Michael Jackson’s story contains almost every ingredient a filmmaker could want: child stardom, paternal abuse, artistic genius, racial politics, physical transformation, media hysteria, commercial domination, cultural rupture and personal collapse. It is the stuff of tragedy, horror, spectacle and opera all at once. A film that truly confronted that complexity could have been electrifying. Instead, Michael appears to prefer reverence to excavation. It dazzles when the music takes over, then retreats when the questions get difficult.
Still, even a compromised biopic can work in bursts when the craft aligns with the subject’s legend. The songs remain the songs. The iconography remains potent. The rise of Michael Jackson, especially in his younger years and imperial phase, is almost impossible to stage without generating some charge. And when Jaafar Jackson is in full flow, the film seems able to briefly convince you that imitation has become transformation. Those moments may not redeem the whole project, but they do stop it from collapsing entirely into hollow homage.
There is also something revealing in the very timidity of the film. If Michael ends up as a glossy, selective, reverential portrait, that in itself says something about the burden of representing Michael Jackson on screen in 2026. The film seems caught between celebration and scrutiny, between commercial accessibility and historical accountability, between the need to entertain and the impossibility of innocence. Perhaps that tension was always going to define the project. Perhaps there was never a version of this story, made under these conditions, that could have felt fully free.
So what are we left with? Not the definitive Michael Jackson film. Not, by the sound of it, a fearless one either. But possibly a compelling star-making showcase for Jaafar Jackson, and a glossy, intermittently watchable reminder that great subjects do not automatically become great movies. Sometimes the legend is too large, the estate too close, and the truth too jagged for a conventional biopic to contain.
Michael looks set to divide viewers for exactly the reasons it should have confronted more directly. As spectacle, it may satisfy. As performance showcase, it may impress. As drama, it sounds frustratingly partial. And as a portrait of one of the most complicated figures in pop history, it may ultimately be remembered less for what it shows than for what it refuses to touch.
Pull-Quote: “Jaafar Jackson may deliver the electricity. The film around him sounds far less willing to face the fire.”
Movieversalfilm Verdict Summary
- Performances: 8/10
- Direction: 5/10
- Score / Music Use: 8/10
- Cinematography: 6/10
- Overall: 5.5/10
Final Verdict
Michael is a polished but frustratingly cautious biopic: elevated by Jaafar Jackson’s central performance, but undermined by a script and structure that seem too nervous to dig into the contradictions of the man behind the myth. It has spectacle, it has iconography, and it appears to have a star-making turn at its centre — but the film itself sounds less interested in truth than in preservation.
Movieversalfilm Rating: 5.5/10
Film Details
- Title: Michael
- Year: 2026
- Director: Antoine Fuqua
- Starring: Jaafar Jackson, Colman Domingo, Nia Long, Miles Teller
- Release Date: 24 April 2026
- Certification: PG-13