One Love * * *

No Woman No Cry. They can still make another one.

If you didn't know anything about Bob Marley, this would be almost incomprehensible.  If you do know something about Bob Marley it's still a bit of a mess, and also a dissapointment.

Bob Marley was one of the most important and iconic persons in contemporary music. He is the most significant of all Reggae singer/songwriters and virtually invented the genre.  He deserves better than this.

Anyway, let's look at the positives: Actor Kingsley Ben-Adir makes a good Bob Marley. A convincing look-a-like.

There are some good scenes,  even if they have a weird vibe of being over rehearsed (or under rehearsed).  Either way there is something self -conscious and unrealistic about many scenes.

 Nevertheless some of the important events are there. His preparation for major concerts, the attempted assassination. The negotiations with contesting gang leaders and politicians. The young Wailers audaciously hustling for a recording contract, the launch of Exodus, the beginning of cancer, the move to the UK at the time that punk was taking off. (The punk movement had huge respect for Reggae incidentally but that isn't well conveyed).

A linear narrative would have helped a lot but we are frequently moving back and forth in time, with a younger  (and very different looking) actor playing Marley. For a while I thought it was another band trying to make a go of things before I realised it was supposed to be the young Wailers. There are persistent flashback scenes of his estranged white father on horseback. 

I doubt that many of the actors have such strong Jamaican accents if they have one at all! But at times they lay it on so thick you can barely make out what they are saying.

James Norton plays Chris Blackwell but unless you know who Blackwell is he just comes across as a pedestrian band manager, whereas the input of Blackwell and Island Records is so formidable it is unlikely that Reggae and Bob Marley in particular would have enjoyed the global popularity that it has. 

Doing a  biography of an iconic musician/performer is always a risky business, but somehow they have managed to make fine films of Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Brian Wilson, NWA, Miles Davis, Judy Garland.  All good!  Such a shame that this one is a let down.  

Like Maestro (the one on Bernstein), for me, the greatest problem with One Love is that it is mostly boring.

Reinaldo Marcus-Green gave us King Richard so I would have expected better.