Jaafar Jackson is astonishing as his late uncle, even if the film around him plays it too safe.
- Jaafar Jackson delivers an uncanny, jaw-dropping performance as the King of Pop.
- Michael opened to a projected 60 to 70 million dollar opening weekend in the US alone.
- The film covers Michael’s life from the Jackson 5 era through to his early solo peak.
- Director Antoine Fuqua brings visual grandeur but the script plays it frustratingly safe.
There is a moment early in Michael when Jaafar Jackson walks onto a stage, tips his hat, and begins to move. The audience in the film goes silent. The audience in the cinema likely will too. Jaafar Jackson is tremendous in Michael, truly making you forget he isn’t the real thing, delivering an off-the-charts performance that channels his uncle in uncanny ways through dance, physical presence, and a beaming smile that belongs unmistakably to the Jackson family. It is a genuinely startling piece of performance work, the kind that makes the entire film worth seeing on its own terms regardless of what surrounds it. And what surrounds it, unfortunately, is a biopic that too often chooses the safe path when the subject himself never did.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by John Logan, Michael follows the King of Pop’s rise from his early days as the standout voice of the Jackson 5 in the 1960s through to his peak as a solo artist, covering the making of Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad with the kind of loving, detail-rich attention that will send fans straight back to their playlists. The musical sequences are the film’s undisputed highlights. Beat It, Billie Jean, and the Thriller choreography are reproduced with stunning accuracy, the vintage recordings gloriously remastered and lip-synced with a physicality that genuinely astonishes. Jaafar nails the sweet, soft-spoken voice with which Michael projected a childlike innocence and vulnerability, but also the single-minded focus with which he pushed his career forward, and in the moments where the film simply lets him perform, it becomes something close to extraordinary.
The supporting cast brings considerable weight to the people around the legend. Colman Domingo as Joe Jackson is the film’s most compelling dramatic presence, bringing complexity and menace to a figure who shaped his son in equal measures of brilliance and damage. Nia Long gives Katherine Jackson a quiet, enduring warmth. Miles Teller as attorney John Branca and Kat Graham as Diana Ross round out an ensemble that has clearly invested in understanding who these people were rather than simply playing recognisable names. The iconic songs from Billie Jean to Beat It to Thriller to Ben are all vintage MJ, gloriously remastered and superbly performed, and Jaafar simply sells this performance with all the right dance moves and sharp dramatic talent to make us believe Michael Jackson is once again with us.
Where the film struggles is in its narrative ambition. Michael is an extraordinarily sanitized, overly audience-friendly music biopic that makes Bohemian Rhapsody look like a complex, nuanced character study, with the dramatic depth of a Wikipedia article that introduces but fails to remotely explore the most fascinating aspects of its subject. The controversies, the contradictions, the extraordinary strangeness of a man who was simultaneously the world’s biggest star and its most publicly scrutinised human being, are handled with a caution that ultimately does Jackson a disservice. The film will not sit well with the cancel crowd but delivers for lifelong fans who cherish Michael Jackson’s music, which is an honest assessment of exactly who this film was made for and exactly who will leave the cinema most satisfied.
For fans of Michael Jackson, of great performance work, and of the kind of musical sequences that remind you why cinema exists, Michael is absolutely worth seeing this weekend in UAE cinemas. It is not the definitive portrait of the King of Pop that his legacy deserves. But Jaafar Jackson’s performance is, without question, one of the most extraordinary feats of physical and emotional channelling that any biopic has ever produced. Go for him. The rest is a very enjoyable bonus.
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Writer: John Logan
Starring: Jaafar Jackson, Colman Domingo, Nia Long, Miles Teller, Laura Harrier, Kat Graham, Larenz Tate, Derek Luke, Kendrick Sampson
Release Date: April 24, 2026 (Global)
