Bob Marley: One Love (2024) is directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and stars Kingsley Ben-Adir, Lashana Lynch, James Norton, Tosin Cole, and Anthony Welsh. The film follows the life and career of the legendary reggae musician Bob Marley (Ben-Adir) as he attempts to unite the world through the message of his music. After an assassination attempt on his life, Bob’s desire for peace and love is reignited, leading him to begin work on a record that would become his magnum opus: Exodus (1977). Dealing with the pressures of fame and eventually, his deteriorating health, Bob bulldozes toward his ultimate goal of bringing people together through the power of his music. 

Although this is an admittedly cliche musical biopic, it’s filled with a variety of strong performances. Most notable are the performances by Ben-Adir and Lynch as Bob and Rita Marley. They’re able to convey a good amount of emotion in their performances and their relationship feels authentic. What hinders these performances and the film overall is the overuse of extremely thick Jamaican accents. On one hand, I appreciate the film’s dedication to authenticity. On the other hand, it’s an undeniably large issue if the audience can’t understand 50 percent of the dialogue. It ends up hindering the development of these characters. We struggle to understand half of their struggles/emotions simply because we can’t hear what they’re saying. Granted, the film does make some self-aware jokes about these thick accents, but that doesn’t make up for it. This makes Ben-Adir’s performance even more impressive. He’s able to convey an overwhelming level of emotion even when half of his dialogue is sacrificed.

The supporting cast is serviceable but doesn’t receive even the slightest amount of focus/character development. Key players are introduced, but not a single one gets any kind of arc. They’re essentially presented as tools in the service of Bob Marley’s story. The supporting cast is large but they move through this film like ghosts. They appear and then disappear with no thematic/story significance. They’re just there to advance the plot.

 Unfortunately, this film is as formulaic as it gets in terms of Musician Biopics (which is one of my favorite subgenres). The film is filled with cliche biopic moments. For example, the film has multiple instances in which Bob is singing on stage and the camera then cuts to close-ups of random audience members as they slowly nod their heads in approval instead of, I don’t know, showing them enjoying the music?! Yes, people appreciated Marley’s message, but at the end of the day, it was his great music that made him popular. People were willing to hear Marley’s message because it was delivered through a universal medium that is mostly about happiness, peace, and good times. The film constantly confuses what was so special about Bob Marley. It always focuses on his “message” being what was special about him, but I believe that couldn’t be farther from the truth. A message of peace and love is admirable but not necessarily original. Two hours of themes about how positive peace and love are? Yeah, cool. I’ve seen that before. What was special about Marley was how he delivered his message: Reggae Music. 

The music is great considering it plays like a version of Bob Marley’s greatest hits, but what’s unfortunate is the clear dubbing that goes on during the musical sequences. I don’t always expect lead actors in these kinds of films to do their own singing (although it does help with realism), but I least expect the dubbing to look natural. In almost every concert scene, I was distracted by the delay between Ben-Adir’s mouth and the voice that we hear. 

One of the film’s overarching issues is its presentation of time. There are strange time jumps throughout the film that feel completely random. For example, there is a scene in which a character is shot but survives and is recovering in a hospital. In the next scene, Bob is playing a concert and at the end, the person who was just in the hospital appears, fully healed and in good spirits. There were absolutely zero clues to signal to the audience that there had been a time jump. This happens multiple times throughout the film and it helps to cover a good portion of Bob’s career. That being said, the film oddly rushes through what seem to be some of the more interesting aspects of his life. It just seems like the wrong choices were made here in terms of what to focus on.

What’s truly perplexing about the film is that it opens with some written exposition that claims the film will focus on one of Marley’s most famous concerts, setting me up for a more contained story. After about the first fifteen minutes, it becomes clear that the opening exposition is more than a bit dishonest. The film has so many time and location jumps that claiming it only focuses on one concert feels like a blatant lie. By the time the film ends, we reach the concert for a total of 1 minute. It was entirely disappointing and admittedly a bit insulting. Why mislead the audience there? Something like that could have easily been changed, so it feels intentional and therefore knowingly dishonest. 

Overall this is a disappointing biopic of Bob Marley’s life. That being said, it never quite felt disrespectful or dispassionate. It feels like the work of an amateur director who quite frankly doesn’t seem to understand the tropes genre. Or, maybe he does understand them but ineffectively attempted to subvert them. Either way, this comes off as a run-of-the-mill piece of cinema. The film’s second half feels unfocused. It’s as if the first half builds to a peak and then the second half is a long epilogue. Its structure is quite frankly a mess. What does work about this film are the strong lead performances, its compelling display of Rastafarianism, and its effective emotional core. It’s all just a bit vanilla in the sense that I wish the film would have been taken on by a director with a more singular creative vision. Marely was one of the greatest music artists of all time and he deserves an equally great director to tell his story right. Unfortunately, after this film, that might not happen for quite a while. C–