The Media Tourist

Bob Marley biopic undersells the story of reggae’s global superstar

Bob Marley: One Love
Starring Kingsley Ben-Adair & Lashana Lynch
Directed by Renaldo Marcus Green
Rated PG-13

In theaters Wednesday, Feb. 14

The new movie about the late, larger-than-life Jamaican superstar depicts Bob Marley bringing reggae music and his Rastafarian mindset to the masses, becoming an almost messianic figure to fans and followers around the world. Focusing on one relatively narrow but significant segment of his life 1976-1978, it shows him as a family man, a rebel caught in the middle of the fractured politics of his home country, a Utopian musical shaman and an adherent to Biblical signs and symbols.

We hear Marley talk more than once about the Lion of Judah, making an Old Testament reference central to the Rastafarian religion.

But unlike a lion, this movie feels rather timid, failing to soar—or roar—with the depth or drama of other hit musical biopics, like Rocketman (Elton John), Ray (Ray Charles), Get Up On It (James Brown) or Bohemian Rhapsody (Freddy Mercury). We see Marley survive an assassination attempt, stage two concerts for peace, smoke prodigious amounts of ganga, release his groundbreaking Exodus album, and muse on his white-Englishman father, who abandoned little Marley when he was a just a lad. We see Marley when he learns he has a rare form of melanoma from an old soccer injury. But the story unfolds in what feels like a mostly haphazard, episodic fashion, showing us things that happen with little connective tissue or real consequence, and the movie never breaks out of its meandering biopic blahs.

In a repeated flashback, we see young Marley as a boy running from a literal ring of fire—without ever really knowing what it’s supposed to mean or represent. But the movie itself fails to catch fire and show us where Marley’s passion for peace was rooted, just how he became an emblem of laid-back, rasta-fied global groovery, or what made his music so uniquely popular in Jamaica and beyond.

British actor Kingsley Ben-Adair gives a solid, all-in performance as Marley, convincingly delivering dialogue in the singer’s Caribbean creole dialect and mimicking his ragdoll-like swept-away-in-the-music onstage movements. Lashana Lynch—who might be recognizable to Marvel fans from her recurring role as Maria Lambeau in MCU movies—is even better as Marley’s wife, Rita, especially in a scene where she smacks him for his infidelities and his unawareness of how he’s becoming corrupted by his success. “You swallow pollution, you get polluted,” she spews, her eyes ablaze.

We hear renditions of Marley’s greatest hits, including “Three Little Birds,” “I Shot the Sheriff,” “One Love,” “Jamming,” “War,” “Redemption Song,” “Get Up, Stand Up” and “No Woman, No Cry,” songs with potent messages—of rebellion, reckoning and reconciliation—that made him a musical hero to millions before his death in 1981, at the young age of 36.

Bob Marley: One Love was made with members of late singer’s family—including wife Rita and son Ziggy—involved as producers (along with Brad Pitt!). That kind of close-range, “hands on” might have steered the director and the project away from some of the broader, nitty-gritty that would have made it feel more lived-in and authentic, and less “deifying.”  

You may be happily “Jamming” to the jaunty sounds of this play-it-safe movie portrait, but music’s rasta messiah would have been better served by a more adventurous, more multifaceted flick about a complicated man and the music that became his message, and his mission.

—Neil Pond

New spy spoof purrs along with crazy action, an all-star cast, a cat in a backpack…and rumors of Taylor Swift

Argylle
Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Henry Cavill & Bryan Cranston
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, Feb. 2

The greater the spy, the bigger the lie.

That’s a phrase you’ll hear several times in this frisky tale of double agents, triple crosses, sexy sleuths and golly-whopping lies, and how a popular, fan-favorite author of espionage novels literally becomes part of the spy-lit stories she’s famous for writing.

Bryce Dallas Howard stars as reclusive writer Elly Conway, whose character of agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) is a superstar in the fictional spy genre—an impossibly handsome, dashing dreamboat secret agent on the trail of a sinister global criminal syndicate. When Elly gets writer’s block about how to wrap up her latest Argylle novel, she’s suddenly, surprisingly swept into the literary world she’s created, finding out that perhaps it’s not so fictional after all.  

Argylle is a crazily creative riff on the spy-action genre, with winks and nods to a lot of things we’ve seen onscreen before, from James Bond romps to Mission: Impossible stunts and John Wick’s hyper-stylized, close-range ultraviolence. But it’s also totally and uniquely its own, zip-zapping and zig-zagging with twists and turns, feisty humor and some wowza sequences, including a battle royale with improvised ice skates on an oil slick and a slo-mo shoot-‘em-up ballet inside a colorful smoke-grenade cloud.

The cast is full of familiar faces, and they all look like they’re having a ball. Sam Rockwell is a hoot as a real-life superspy with a deep secret, or two—or maybe three. There’s also a dastardly duplicitous turn by Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson as a basketball-loving, wine-aficionado counterspy, and Schitt’s Creek’s Catherine O’Hara along with John Cena, plus singer-actors Ariana Dubose and Dua Lipa. Just about everyone is pretending to be someone else, or hiding something, or both, or more. There’s computer hacking, skull-cracking, screwball romantic comedy and a plot sweetly serenaded by “Now and Then,” the final Beatles song, and some classic dance-floor groove-ery by Barry White. Oh, yeah, and Dua Lipa on a motorcycle, with a machine gun.

And one very cool cat. Elly’s constant companion is her Scottish fold feline, Alfie, who spends most of the movie inscrutably going along for the wild ride, peering through the porthole in her backpack decorated with Scottish, argyle-pattern diamonds. But when Alfie gets out, watch out for those claws (and the same for Elly!). Alfie isn’t agent Argylle, but he anchors the movie with his presence—not to mention some of its best gags. Hello, kitty, indeed!

British director Matthew Vaughn certainly knows his way around a labyrinth of spies and deception, peppered with high-octane violence and zingy Brit wit, as he demonstrated in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and The Kingsman and its two sequels. (Stick around for the credits and see the movie’s shoutout to the spy world of The Kingsman, plus how Argyll is connected.)

Speaking of connected, there’s been a lot of buzz about how Argylle might be connected to cat-loving superstar Taylor Swift. Bryce Dallas Howard let the cat out of the bag when she admitted that the director was “inspired” by a photo of Swift with one of her cats—a Scottish fold—in a backpack, just like the one strapped to Elly in the movie. Swiftys have buzzing about how perhaps the whole movie was even ghost-written as a side project by the hitmaking singer-songwriter. (It wasn’t, the director insists.)

“I don’t know who to trust,” Elly says, her eyes opening wide to the crazy swirl of danger and deception in which she’s found herself. But trust me on this: You’ll have to open your eyes and see Argylle for yourself to sort out the lies from the spies, the facts from the fiction, and tap into the cool-cat vibes of this high-spirited, creatively fresh spin on a time-tested genre. And Argylle might not turn out to have nine lives, but it’s supposedly meant to set the stage for at least two more installments.  

It’s a delightfully preposterous, big-budget popcorn movie with the improbable power to unite action lovers, espionage buffs, cat fanciers and Taylor Swift fans, wrapping them all up in the merry mayhem of flying bullets, multi-layered mystery and the sweet bow of a Beatles swan song.  

And, yes, great spies, big lies, huge surprises and lots of fun!

—Neil Pond

A classic teen comedy gets fletch new faces and a zippy new musical spin

Mean Girls
Starring Reneé Rapp, Angourie Rice, Auli’I Cravalho & Christopher Briney
Directed by Samantha Jayne & Aururo Perez Jr.
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, Jan. 12

It’s time to go back to high school with this zippy new musical spin on a teen-comedy classic.

The revamped Mean Girls combines the storyline, deets and characters of the original film—released 20 years ago—with songs and showtunes from its later incarnation as a Broadway musical, which opened in 2018 but shut down two years later due to the COVID pandemic.

And it’s unquestionably grool.

That means groovy and cool, for anyone un-hip to the many memorable lines from this oh-so-quotable coming-of-age tale about a young math nerd, Cady (Angourie Rice), who becomes an unlikely competitor to her high school’s alpha female, Regina George (Reneé Rapp), while joining Regina’s tight clique of bratty hangers-on (Bebe Wood and the mono-monikered Avantika).

Mean Girls fans—especially the next-gen crowd to whom the new film is clearly targeted—will spot a host of recognizable fresh faces. Rapp is a 24-year-old singer/actress who’s reprising her leading role from the Broadway version; she also plays Leighton Murray in Mindy Kaling’s teen-comedy Max series The Sex Lives of College Girls. The Australian-born Rice got her start in The Nice Guys with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, and she’s also appeared in Spider-Man: Far From Home, Sofia Coppola’s remake of The Beguiled and alongside Miley Cyrus in an episode of the horror anthology Black Mirror.

Christopher Briney, who plays Cady’s dreamy crush—and importantly, Regina’s ex-boyfriend—Aaron, also stars in the Prime YA video series The Summer I Turned Pretty. Tina Fey, whose script provided the quippy zing for the 2004 film, reprises her original role as math teacher Ms. Norbury, along with fellow SNL alum Tim Meadows, who once again mines the low-key hilarity of the school’s ever-unamused principal Duvall. Fey also joins Lorne Michaels, the iconic producer of Saturday Night Live, as a co-producer—financing the bottom line of this production, where Mean Girls means serious movie business.  

Cady’s friend Damien (who’s “almost too gay to function”) is revitalized by a scene-stealing Jacquel Spivey, who honed his award-winning, Grammy-nominated chops in musical theater. Auli’i Cravalho, who plays Damien’s bestie and Cady’s art-nerd pal Janis, previously provided the soaring voice of Moana in Disney’s 2016 animated musical fantasy.

There are loads of fan-favorite callbacks to the original film (which sparkled with now-indelible performances from Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, Lacey Chalbert and Lizzy Caplan). Watch for a very special cameo at the math competition! But this new Mean Girls stakes its own claim as a top-notch new adaptation with a vibrant singing cast and some truly standout performances, especially from Cravalho, Rice and Rapp in absolutely showstopping numbers like “World Burn,” “Revenge Party,” “I’d Rather Be Me” and “Someone Gets Hurt.”

Tina Fey almost breaks into a song; Fargo’s Jon Hamm (below) doesn’t come near it, but he certainly makes the most of his two scenes as Coach Carr, who pulls no punches as he hits below the belt in the health class he also teaches. (I can’t wait to see all his outtakes in the bonus materials when the movie comes to Blu-ray.)

It all adds up to a mile of smiles, an engagingly witty cautionary tale about the bubbling caldron of peer pressure, snobbery, gossip and backstabbing fibbery that is—and has always been—high school, wrapped now in catchy songs and an uplifting teen-spirit message about true friendship and acceptance, and never pushing anyone in front of a bus.  

And if anything can, indeed, make fetch happen, it’ll be the infectious musical fun of Mean Girls. So get in, loser!

—Neil Pond