Having just watched the overwhelmingly underwhelming Bob Marley: One Love, I have decided that Hollywood’s obsession with biopics must be stopped. Biopics have become so ubiquitous, so pervasive, so unoriginal, that Kingsley Ben-Adir, who plays Marley in the film, has already starred in two other biopics: The Comey Rule as Barack Obama and One Night in Miami as Malcolm X.
A biopic can feel like little more than a Wikipedia page
Real-life stories have become so popular that this year we will be treated to not one, but two dramatisations of Prince Andrew’s disastrous BBC Newsnight interview. Will they offer anything more than a competition between who has the better hair and make up teams, or who can make sure the actor playing Andrew does not sweat under the lights?
Biopics are mostly boring and predictable because they tend to fall into one of three categories. The first is a voyeuristic spectacle of suffering, usually on a female subject: think Renee Zellwegger as a slurring Judy Garland, Naomi Ackie as an overdosing Whitney Houston, or Ana de Armas as a self-harming Marilyn Monroe, in a film that is really little
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