Bob Marley: One Love (2024) * 1/2

 

Directed by: Reinaldo Marcus Green

Starring:  Kinglsey Ben-Adir, Lashana Lynch, Michael Gandolfini, James Norton

Bob Marley: One Love must have been filmed for those already integrally familiar with the reggae legend.  Those who know little or nothing about him won't find many hints of why he was immortalized in music history or his personal life.   The movie is flat, without much energy or passion, two things which Marley had in abundance.   Kingsley Ben-Adir, who convincingly played Malcolm X in One Night in Miami (2020), plays Marley with a wink and a smile and not much else.  The performance, just like the movie in which it appears, drifts along without much direction or payoff, with dialogue delivered in impenetrable Jamaican accents 

The movie, except for brief flashbacks, at least spares us a thirty-minute setup in which Marley's childhood is examined.   The movie covers 1976 to 1978, two pivotal years in Marley's life in which he recorded his most famous album Exodus and became a worldwide phenomenon to match his already larger-than-life status in his native Jamaica.   When the movie opens, Jamaica's two top political parties engage in violent war against each other in a power struggle.  Marley announces a free concert for peace, but before that happens, he, his wife Rita (Lynch), and his manager are shot by home invaders.  Marley and Rita survived, while his manager died.  Marley attempts to perform at the concert, but the risks to his life are too grave and he and Rita separate strategically.   He and his Wailers go to live and work in London.  Rita and Marley's countless kids move to the U.S.  Bob says this will help him find answers, but mostly it allows him to smoke weed, record, and screw any woman he can find. 

One Love follows a recent musical biopic tradition in which the artist's most famous songs are written and recorded after instant flashes of genius.   "Jammin'" is written in about five minutes and performed expertly in one take.  Before you can say "Bob Marley", Bob and the Wailers are traveling Europe to sold-out audiences with Ben-Adir mimicking Marley's singing style.  Then, after a conversation with Rita, he returns to Jamaica to play the concert he only partially played two years prior, or was it just a dream that he played it?  The movie doesn't exactly make it clear.   There isn't an iota of power in this movie.   It just plays on the screen boringly and inertly.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green's previous movie was King Richard (2021), which netted Will Smith the Best Actor Oscar, and while it is an ok movie at best, it's a masterpiece compared to Bob Marley: One Love, which has mostly evaporated from my memory.   The smoke from the endless amounts of marijuana smoked in the movie hangs around longer.   For a minute, I expected Cheech and Chong to show up, or I was hoping they would.