As it turns out, it’s exceptionally easy to make a musical biopic. Step one: pick your favorite musical artist, preferably popular before 1990. Do you have yours in mind? Good! Step two: read a Wikipedia article about your artist, and write your script around it. Start your movie in the middle of the story, intersplice your film with flashbacks to the artist’s childhood and throw in a few scenes of conflict with their romantic partner while you’re at it. 

Add a couple cheesy scenes about how your favorite artist wants to “make a new sound” while making their most critically acclaimed album. Step three: cast a little-known actor or actress to portray your favorite musician. Play off the audience’s nostalgia for the artist’s music, and have the end of the movie be the artist’s most well-known set. Rinse-repeat this process, making the most cookie-cutter movies imaginable, all while Hollywood gets to rake in Scrooge McDuck levels of cash off of viewers’ love for the artist’s music. 

‘Bob Marley: One Love’ is the latest installation in this genre of artist biopics. As you can imagine, it follows the aforementioned formula. Fundamentally, almost everything about this movie can be described in one word: unremarkable. While there is nothing glaringly wrong with it, it doesn’t make an effort to be exceedingly good.

The highlight of the movie was Lashana Lynch’s performance as Rita Marley, Marley’s wife. She very easily provides the best performance, highlighting Rita’s burden as a mother, an emotional support for Bob and a jilted wife after Bob’s infidelity. Unfortunately, everyone else in the acting department was simply mediocre. The biggest disappointment was Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob Marley, whose lackluster performance dramatically affects the movie. Again, the issue is not that Ben-Adir was a poor actor, or exhibited irrefutable errors in his execution — he simply wasn’t memorable.

The thematics of the movie are as shallow as a puddle. It tries — and fails — to adequately tackle the issue of racism throughout the picture. Instead of exploring this idea in interesting ways through the lived experience of one of the world’s most famous Black musical artists, the best it can muster is one line — quote — that amounts to “racism is bad.” The movie shows a similar lack of depth when it makes a disappointing attempt to discuss themes of belonging, family and home. All this to say, if a film’s themes can be summed up by a corny bumper sticker, the production team did something wrong.

Plot-wise, the movie decides to go with the very basic “flashback to childhood” approach. It came across as though the writers wanted to talk about Marley’s childhood but didn’t have enough content to justify designating a full act of the movie to it. The flashbacks provide insights into the movie’s themes of home and belonging — but outside of this, these scenes felt blustering and improperly executed in regard to the flow of the movie.

Yet I cannot say that I wasn’t entertained while watching the movie and the pacing was adequate to stop me from being bored. Even if most things about this movie are average, it was just captivating enough to keep me engaged despite my lack of knowledge of Bob Marley as a musician. 

By no means am I trying to say that this film is outright awful. I’m sure there is a lot to love for die-hard Marley fans in this film, and if you are one yourself, there’s no harm in giving it a watch. However, to the average viewer, this movie is generic and uninspired, consistently failing to live up to Marley’s creative genius. I cannot say I would recommend it to anyone who doesn’t have Marley on their Spotify wrapped.