Michael (2026) Review: A Stunning Performance Trapped in a Shallow Biopic

Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately: we are Michael Jackson fans. Big ones. We’ve seen Cirque du Soleil’s MJ tribute. We’ve watched every documentary, every concert recording, every behind-the-scenes we could find. We know the stories. We know the music. That context matters for this review because Michael — directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by John Logan — is a film that will hit completely differently depending on how much you already know walking in.

For MJ newcomers, this is an inspired, entertaining, concert-heavy introduction to the greatest entertainer who ever lived. For fans like us, it’s a beautifully produced Wikipedia article with a runtime.

Jaafar Jackson: A 10 Out of 10 Performance

We have to start here because everything else needs context. Jaafar Jackson — Michael’s nephew — does something in this film that we genuinely did not think was possible: he channels his uncle in a way that feels less like impersonation and more like channeling. The moves, the mannerisms, the vocal inflections, the way he carries himself in quiet moments between performances — it’s all there, and it’s filled with heart and soul you cannot fake.

We’ve seen Michael Jackson impersonators in Vegas. We’ve seen tribute acts from around the world. None of them come close to what Jaafar does here. This is the best, most complete depiction of Michael Jackson as a performer and human being that has ever been put on screen. It is a 10 out of 10 performance, full stop, and it single-handedly justifies the ticket price for any fan of the music.

Colman Domingo as Joe Jackson is the film’s other towering achievement. Every scene he’s in crackles with a quiet menace that never tips into cartoonish villainy — you understand exactly how a man like this could simultaneously build an empire and devastate the people inside it. His scenes with Jaafar are the best pure drama the film has to offer.

The Problem: It’s All Headlines, No Depth

Here’s the thing about Michael Jackson’s life: it is one of the most extraordinary, complex, and genuinely fascinating stories in the history of entertainment. The child prodigy robbed of a childhood. The father who built a machine out of his sons. The quiet battle for creative independence. The way the MTV racial barrier was broken not with protest but with a phone call and a deadline. The Pepsi accident and what it set in motion. The skin condition and the surgeries and the mounting eccentricities that all had real psychological roots.

Any one of those threads could sustain a compelling two-hour film. Michael covers all of them in roughly ten minutes each. The result is what we can only describe as a romanticized Wikipedia entry — every major headline from 1968 to the Bad Tour in 1988, presented in order, polished to a shine, and emptied of almost all genuine depth. By the time the film hits its climax — Michael publicly declaring his independence from his father at Dodger Stadium — the moment should land like a gut punch. It lands like a shoulder tap.

The MTV scene is genuinely great and worth mentioning specifically. The depiction of CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff threatening to pull every major artist from the channel unless they play Michael Jackson within ten minutes is electric, historically grounded, and exactly the kind of story this film should have been full of. There are dozens more like it in the real history. We got one.

A Concert That Forgot It Was a Movie

The uncomfortable truth about Michael is that the majority of its runtime is dedicated to musical performance sequences rather than storytelling. This is not inherently a problem — great music biopics use performance as emotional punctuation. The issue here is that the performances often arrive without enough story weight behind them to make them land the way they should. You’re watching technically brilliant recreations of iconic moments while feeling vaguely disconnected from why any of it matters to the man performing them.

Compare this to Rocketman, where Elton John’s music is woven directly into his psychological state at every turn, or Elvis, where the performances feel like escalating expressions of a man being consumed alive. Michael has the concert. It doesn’t always have the why.

The notable absence of Janet Jackson — who reportedly withdrew after finding early scripts inaccurate — is a conspicuous gap. So is Jermaine’s Motown departure, which gets a single sentence before he reappears at the Victory Tour as if nothing happened. These aren’t minor omissions. They’re structural holes in what should be a complete portrait.

A Divided House

We left the theater with genuinely split reactions and we’re going to be honest about that. One of us — the bigger MJ fan who has consumed every piece of existing documentation — found it entertaining but unsatisfying, a 4 out of 10 as a film. The other, coming in with lower expectations and less prior knowledge, had a great time and came away around a 7 or 8. We’ve settled on a 6 out of 10 as our combined score, which we think is honest.

The critics currently sitting at 38% on Rotten Tomatoes aren’t wrong. The 97% audience score isn’t wrong either. Both reactions make complete sense. This film is a concert experience with biographical framing. If that’s what you want — and a lot of people clearly do — you’re going to have a wonderful time. If you came for the full, messy, complicated, brilliant story of the most famous person who ever lived, this isn’t it.

Somewhere there’s a three-and-a-half-hour cut of this film. Based on what we saw, that version might be the one worth making. Whether it ever surfaces — and whether a sequel can navigate the legal and moral complexities of the story’s second half — remains to be seen.