By Luke Thomas, May 5, 2026
While Antoine Fuqua’s long-awaited biopic on the King of Pop is assured to bring in a crowd, the film ultimately lacks the ability to tell an interesting story about the complicated singer.
This was unsurprising, as the film being so heavily controlled by the Jackson estate meant that it could never depict a flawed image of its beloved subject, but the finished product was a portrait with almost no nuance at all.
Fuqua’s “Michael” chronicles the life of legendary pop-star Michael Jackson, from his start in Jackson 5 up to his involvement in the Victory Tour in 1984, entirely focusing the film on the rise of MJ, particularly on his journey to full dissolution from his father, Joseph Jackson.
As far as biopics go, it’s an extremely functional one. It contains most of the bits and pieces needed for this to chronicle the rise of Michael Jackson but never truly excels at anything, aside from the great work from both Jaafar Jackson and especially Juliano Krue Valdi, who played the adult and child Michael Jackson, effectively capturing his vocals and physical mannerisms.
While MJ’s conflict with his father, played by an underwhelming Colman Domingo, is a solid piece of conflict to stitch through the length of the film, there’s not much else to grab onto outside of it. The nature of trying to fit 26 years of a person’s life into a little over two hours causes the film to feel overstuffed in material and underdeveloped in what it chooses to include, as it skims through the highlights of the first half of Michael’s career.
There’s a lot of emphasis on portraying the adult Michael as child-like in nature, wanting to play “Twister” with his uninterested siblings or connecting with a CGI monkey to attempt to draw as many “awws” from the audience as it can, which were generally effective, as many were heard to my right during my screening.
Despite Jaafar Jackson’s strong performance, there’s often a lack of effective direction, which keeps the set-pieces of the film, MJ’s music sequences, from being as engaging as they should. One particularly noticeable example was the scene recounting the production of the iconic “Thriller” music video.
MJ tells the cinematographer he wants his feet to be visible in the shot to show the full choreography, but the following sequence continuously cuts to close-ups and medium shots, hiding his legs. Still, “Michael’s” presentation never teeters into bad — aside from one unfortunately pivotal scene — so some of the punchiness of MJ’s tracks and Jaafar Jackson’s physical performance remain.
But there was always a lingering sense of something missing from the picture, as the repeated mentions of MJ’s interest in Peter Pan’s Neverland, scenes of him visiting children’s hospitals and the child-like nature the film portrays him with kept the reality of the singer’s future within earshot.
These elements of the film were no doubt intended to be explored further, as the film was notably forced to scrap its third act, which would’ve focused on the child molestation accusations that plagued the singer’s late-stage career, although the Jackson estate’s control over the production hints to a more dismissive approach toward the allegations, even if had they remained. But in its current form, the film ends up feeling incomplete from the effects of the reshoots.
Even ignoring those aspects, ‘Michael’ still lacks much of any nuance about the singer in its unaffected writing. Of the complicated bits of MJ’s life the film does include, like his nose job, they’re dropped right after they’re introduced, as the film goes back to selling you on the internal goodness of its subject. The lasting effects these parts of his life had on him are swept under the rug for another track to be played.
“Michael” may be a crowd-pleaser with its focus on compiling the singer’s greatest hits in an easily digestible manner, but the current version of the film sits in an unfinished position, with the biggest conflict of his career always visible just around the corner. Those allegations will have to wait for the sequel, “if the price is right.”