Sean Marshall For years, I hoped and prayed that I would live long enough to see Hollywood do a biopic on my favorite artist from back home, Jamaica, Bob Marley. In 2018, my dream came true. Paramount Pictures revealed that they would do the first biopic on Bob Marley and that Ziggy Marley, his son, would produce it. The film was going to be directed by Reinaldo Green, the Bronx native who directed King Richard and We Own This City.
Bob Marley: One Love stars Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob Marley, alongside Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley. The film starts in 1976 when Bob, Rita, and some of his band members were shot in his home on 56 Hope Road, grounds itself in his years in London, and ends with his return to Jamaica.
A film based on the life of such a triumphant and influential musician like Bob Marley should’ve been handled with more care. Almost everything about this film was lukewarm. From the casting, horrible accents, and pacing of the story to the disastrous loc wig Kingsley wore that looks like it came from the set of a Tyler Perry series. This film was disrespectful to the legend, and what made it hurt that much more was that Ziggy, his son, decided not to pull an actor from Jamaica to represent his father in the movie. To some, this may seem like a minor mishap and could be overlooked, but for those of us who are connected culturally to Jamaica and call it home, this decision left most of us wounded.
No matter how hard I tried to come to terms with Kingsley and Lashana playing Bob and Rita, I couldn’t. Neither one felt like their real-life counterparts. I felt no connection to these characters, not because of who they were but because of how they were portrayed. This is something that I can’t solely put on the actors. Green, Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers, and Zach Baylin, the writers, didn’t know how to manage this hefty story. Chris Blackwell, played by James Norton, who was a record producer and the founder of Island Records and helped push Bob’s music to a mainstream audience, was barely in the film. Howard Bloom, a well-known publicist who worked with Bob throughout his Uprising Tour, was in the film for one scene. Bloom was played by Michael Gandolfini. Bloom’s presence felt unnecessary.
The film suffered from the sprinkling of rushed clips of Bob’s childhood and teenage years without giving moviegoers much to connect to. Bob’s disconnect from his father and his upbringing is what made him the man he was. The movie also touched lightly on his extramarital activities. By the time this comes around, you don’t care, and the writers expect you to already know about this without it being included in the film. Bob and Rita’s infidelities came up during an argument in the back alley of a London street. How are we supposed to feel Rita’s pain if we never saw it?
Bob has twelve children, six of whom are well-known musicians, and yet only Ziggy is mentioned heavily throughout the film. Stephen Marley was mentioned once at the beginning of the film, but that was it. Why skip over Bob’s relationship with his children, his home life, and the women outside of his marriage that he laid down with?
Believe it or not, even though the film was a misfire, it did have one thing that it got right, and that was the music. Scenes where Bob’s music was played, and his voice roared like a lion are what helped this film shine. I still feel like Skip Marley, Bob’s grandson, should’ve been chosen for this film, as he is young and favors his grandfather.
Bob Marley: One Love is a dry, watered-down, and weak representation of Bob’s life. The acting is horrible, the story lacks any direction, and the film boxed itself by not being longer. Hopefully, we’ll get to see another biopic about Bob in the years to come, and maybe next time, Ziggy or whoever oversees the film from the Marley estate will take some notes from how the Jacksons are doing it for the 2025 film Michael.
