Bob Marley: One Love Review
The world’s most famous reggae musician Bob Marley’s biographical film is here in the form of Bob Marley: One Love. Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and written by both Terence Winter and Frank E. Flowers, this biopic depicts the struggles of life in Jamaica and the influence that Marley had on the world.
The film stars Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob Marley and Natasha Lynch as his wife Rita, where both of them play the roles phenomenal. What makes this movie different from than other musical biopics is that the actors are actually singing, rather than lip syncing like in Bohemian Rhapsody and Straight Outta Compton. This made each one of the musical scenes much more enjoyable to watch. You could actually feel the music as if you were watching a live performance. With this being said, “One Love” does include songs where the audio is Bob Marley, but these are not performance songs. When it comes to music this movie has a great soundtrack with many Bob Marley and the Wailer’s classics as well as others that only diehard fans would recognize.
The one thing that hold’s this movie down is the story that the writers decided to with. The film starts in 1976, where Bob Marley is already famous in his home country of Jamaica where political uprisings are occurring. This film is more about the creation of the album Exodus and the potential civil war rather than Bob Marleys uprising into the war and then into a musician. The film explains in the begging the setting and how Bob Marley came from nothing. I felt as if they should have shown those scenes at the beginning, but instead we were given quick flashback scenes that could have been elaborated to help us understand Marley much more. This would have made the music scenes much better.
Bob Marley One Love is a very powerful movie and is strong when it comes to the actor’s performance. This is a fun movie to watch and was quite entertaining. It did suffer from a small pacing issue, but this was one of the better musical biopic films that has been released.
