Rent Bob Marley: One Love (2024)

Bob Marley: One Love review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

One Love gives Bob Marley the musical biopic so standard it’s almost insulting how distanced the film is from saying anything beyond its surface-level referencing of the Rastafarian. It covers his rise to fame, influence, and personal struggles and highlights his many concerts and recordings with musical sections. While actor Kingsley Ben-Adir does a solid job portraying the legendary musical figure, it’s a shame he feels wasted in such a movie. He’s all dressed up to give an Oscar-worthy performance with a script that feels more appropriate for a Lifetime TV movie.

It’s not that Marley’s life wasn’t an inspiring tale worth telling, considering where the film begins amid the political violence of 1976 Jamaica. Their commitment seems just after having been attacked by assassins and surviving the attempt on his life. Marley’s life in music will be as dangerous as it is meaningful. While the film covers many broad points, it also provides a ho-hum simplicity to how Bob’s best music was born. At one point, Marley’s inspiration for an album comes from one of his cohorts playing a vinyl soundtrack for the film Exodus. You can see the lightbulb go off over his head when he hears the title and starts plucking away at a tune.

The film wants to cover a lot of ground, and it always feels like it’s struggling to find its footing. We get to see Marley travel worldwide and delight in his music, but we rarely feel the weight of that presence in various locations. We get to see him handle the isolation that came with his upbringing and the disheartening nature of his degraded country, but only in the faintest of glimpses that feel like flashes from a music video. Even Marley's feuds with his relationships have an eerie level of passivity, where the film comes off as strangely distant from its subject matter. There’s a reverence placed on Bob Marley in this film that comes off as heartfelt but also far too cautious to say anything beyond the surface of the reggae star.

For covering the critical years of Marley’s success, it’s odd how this film never feels like it gets to the heart of the matter. Fame seems to hog the spotlight, and the more significant elements of the celebrity's character feel like they’re quietly brushed aside. The association with marijuana is treated almost like a joke in passing, the turmoil of the world is treated more like a nuisance that keeps popping up than a dire threat, and the quirks of the music industry come off so standard. The jam sessions for Marley’s notable works and his discussions with his producers come off, so by the numbers in the assembly, they’re a real snooze fest. It’s enough to make one keep looking at the clock, counting the minutes until the next concert scene to break off the doldrums.

Sadly, One Love falls victim to being far too routine for such a figure. It goes through the motions one would expect of a movie biopic, treating the legend with passivity as it shuffles from world event to concert scene. There’s certainly more to explore with Marley; perhaps the music in this film will inspire the young to seek out his works. Hopefully, they’ll do just that, as they could probably learn more about Marley’s mindset from the way he sings than the standard movie treatment he receives in One Love. Later, they can expand their knowledge and realize that a film like this is barely half the story.