NOW IN THEATERS! The face that has spilled a thousand bongs finally hits the big screen in director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s crowd-pleaser Bob Marley: One Love. It opened in Jamaica in 1976. Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is planning a giant concert to try to unite the island country, which is being ripped up by political violence. However, there is an assassination attempt at this home, with both Marley and his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) catching bullets.
Once they recover, Marley ships his family to the US for their safety. He and his band, the Wailers, then take off to London to record their new album. They land right smack into the punk revolution, which Marley embraced and later influenced. The Wailers worked on a record that would stand up for the rights of everyone, which became the landmark LP Exodus. They tour the world, sparking a love of reggae music across the globe. But to Marley, the success isn’t important. What matters is the message, which he is determined to keep delivering, even if it kills him.
Lashana Lynch as “Rita Marley” and Kingsley Ben-Adir as “Bob Marley” in Bob Marley: One Love from Paramount Pictures.
“…planning a giant concert to try to unite the island country, which is being ripped up by political violence.”
Any long-awaited bio-pic on a figure as important as Marley is bound to run into a hurricane of heavy expectations. To paraphrase Marley himself, you can please some people sometimes, but you cannot please everyone all the time. So screenwriters Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers, and Zach Baylin had a nearly impossible task here. It does help that it was overseen by Marley’s family, including his son Ziggy and his wife Rita, to ensure insight and authenticity. It was also a shrewd move to start the movie with a bang, raising the stakes immediately.
Of course, that tension is dropped once Jamaica is left and only flutters again at the end. It’s a weird sandwich of two pieces of meat with bread in the middle. Whatever groove was caught is skipped, leaving no other direction other than the known death. This momentum stall is one of many threads that can be pulled.