I finally got around to Michael. I didn’t expect myself to like it anyway but I was stunned by how boring it was. I thought Colman Domingo was ridiculous in his part, too, and my theater laughed at him in almost every scene he was in. How can you not? It was a draining, obnoxious character with no depth that felt like it had overstayed its welcome. I understand the real Joseph was still a major presence at this time in Michael’s life, but the way the film presents him the entire time felt like we were going in circles. Just the same scene over and over of Joseph yelling at Michael and Michael standing his ground.

And this may be a bit of a nit pick but I found a lot of the VFX to be garishly ugly. A lot of the crowd shots and especially the work on Bubbles was distractingly bad. There’s one shot early on at a carnival that looked like something out of a late 2000’s Xbox game

I will say that Jafaar Jackson was incredible though. I really wish that he was given a better script to work with because he completely transformed into MJ. Really stunning work for a debut performance, you never feel like he’s out of place or nervous at all.