Antoine Fuqua’s Michael arrives like a greatest-hits sizzle reel stretched to 127 minutes. A review of the demi-biopic says the film runs from Michael Jackson’s early days with the Jackson Five to his rise as a solo star, then lands on the 1988 Wembley Stadium concert and flashes the words “The story continues” before the credits. The big question hanging over the movie is not whether it moves quickly. It is whether it says anything that a fan or a skeptic has not already seen packaged elsewhere.
The answer, in the review’s telling, is mostly no. Jaafar Jackson, 29, plays his uncle in the lead role, while Juliano Valdi appears as the 10-year-old Michael in the opening act. Colman Domingo is Joe Jackson, Nia Long is Katherine Jackson, Kendrick Sampson is Quincy Jones, Miles Teller plays lawyer John Branca, and Mike Myers turns up as CBS president Walter Yetnikoff. The review says the movie gives the chimp, the llama and the giraffe, but not the elephant in the living room.
That line points to the film’s central omission. The review says Michael skims over Jackson’s offstage life and avoids probing the allegations and scrutiny that shadowed his career, even as it leans hard into spectacle and familiar music-biopic beats. Joe Jackson is described as the one supporting role allowed to let rip, while the rest of the cast is largely kept on a short leash. The effect, the review argues, is less a portrait than a polished exercise in iconography.
That matters because the movie is already being discussed as only the first half of a bigger project. Producer Graham King and the Jackson family estate are reportedly considering a “Michael 2,” and the film’s own end card practically invites that reading. With the Wembley concert showing Jackson at 30 and the story closing before it reaches the harder chapters, the sequel talk feels less like a rumor than a built-in escape hatch. For now, Michael looks less like a finished account than a placeholder for the rest of the story.
