As someone who has been watching Bollywood biopics for the last decade, there should be little in Antoine Fuqua’s Michael that should upset me. When the protagonist is not showing off his god-given talent on screen, all that the secondary characters talk about is how special he is. It is a film that mistakes superficial tics like voice, make-up and costume as authenticity. Also, a film that confuses grit for honesty. It’s eerie how much of Fuqua’s biopic on the ‘King of Pop’ seems to internalise and then channel Rajkumar Hirani’s Sanju (2018). Hirani’s biopic on Sanjay Dutt is among the gold standards of Bollywood biopics; the hardest anyone’s worked to vindicate its powerful protagonist. Michael might be Hollywood’s answer to Sanju. However, Fuqua’s film is arguably more dishonest than Hirani’s film – or dozens of other hagiographies produced in the Hindi film industry for that matter. I realised this only halfway into Michael, but I finally began to see how the film was probably conceptualised. A bunch of suits sitting inside a boardroom, poring over hundreds of data points to estimate and understand Michael Jackson’s fame. A still from Michael.Fuqua’s film is least interested in being a biopic, it’s not playing the authenticity game. It doesn’t wish to unearth the man from underneath the icon. It just wants to whet our appetite for the nostalgia for the singular musician, pepper the film with sequences recreating the iconic music videos/stage performances, while using the most bland plotting as connective tissue. The year is 1966 in Gary, Indiana, where Joseph Jackson (Colman Domingo) is assembling an act for the ages – the Jackson Five. “We’re black folk from Indiana, no one’s going to give anything to us. We have to take it,” comes the pep talk from a domineering father, who believes in belting his children before placing them on America’s entertainment carousel. Domingo, one of the best American actors working today, is forced to suffer the humiliation of playing this paper-thin antagonist in the film. It’s the kind of flat ‘villain’, where Domingo wears misty grey contact lens (shorthand for ‘nefarious’), I could smell the money through the screen. Domingo’s Joseph Jackson is so one-note as the greedy showbiz parent, berating and undermining Michael’s talent as the “family’s success” that he belongs in a Madhur Bhandarkar film.A still from Michael.Jaafar Jackson, son of Jermaine Jackson and nephew of Michael Jackson, is earnest through most of it. Imitating Michael’s atypical voice, his dance moves, he nails the cosmetics of the character. However, the Michael on screen has little to no interiority, we get no peek into the man’s mind. All we get are bullet-point nuggets about a once-in-a-generation phenomenon: afraid of his father, close to his mother, animal lover, mystified by fairytales, toys, and loves ice cream. This is the kind of bland, boring biopic made using information from focus groups.Fuqua’s Michael might become a yardstick in how insincere a film can be. Forget delving into the many controversies around Jackson’s life, the film ends long before the contentious part of Jackson’s career begins. But, the more I think about it, I don’t think they intended this to be a film that revealed anything. It was always meant to be a concert film with some uncomplicated acting. I’d go so far as to also speculate that if the technology was good enough (and it was morally acceptable today) – the studio might have made the film using AI. Only marginally better than AI slop, Michael uses its subject as a meal-ticket.By the number of phones that came out to record sequences recreating Thriller, Beat It, Bad, I’m assuming the suits know something I don’t. If it’s so easy to cajole ‘fans’, then maybe the war is already lost.*Michael is playing in theatres