For someone who led such a colourful life as Freddie Mercury, Bohemian Rhapsody is a remarkably coy film. Everything is kind of kept at arm’s length - Mercury’s sexuality, his famous parties and his complicated love life. The stuff is there, on the surface at least, but we never delve into details. The film is much more interested in the band’s performances than it is in the mindsets of the members.

To be fair, the musical scenes are great. They’re superbly filmed and they’re full of energy. And we even get treated to the full Live Aid set. But it’s a beautiful decoration on a deeply unsatisfying cake. If I want to watch the Live Aid performance, I can just watch the original on You Tube. What I wanted here was to get into Freddie Mercury’s head, but I don’t think the film does a good job of that at all.

Also, it plays hard and fast with the truth. The film makes it seem like this is Freddie’s last hurrah. He gets diagnosed with HIV, has a tearful hug with his band members and then turns in the best performance of his life. The only problem is that, in reality, he was diagnosed with HIV two years after Live Aid. The cynical manipulation here is staggering. You even have the band members almost crying while they perform. ‘Oh look at brave Fred, giving it his all even though he’s on his last legs’ they say with their eyes.

Therefore this tremendous performance becomes like something out of Rocky. Freddie gets diagnosed with HIV two years early, struggles to perform in band practice and then trains his arse off. Everyone is shitting bricks on the day of, but when it comes to nut-cutting time, he sings like a mustachioed angel. Crowd goes wild. Credits roll. And then we get a brief bit of text saying that he died in the early nineties. However, we never actually see him ill (besides coughing up blood once or twice) because seeing that would be too painful and too complicated and would not sit well with this Disneyfied version of the man.

I also resent the subtext of the movie. Freddie Mercury here is portrayed as a sad loser pining after his ex-fiance. This is the reason that he decides to start having lavish parties. From what I’ve read he was indeed something of a lonely man. However, he also just liked having fun and seemed to have a good sense of humour. But this joy is never present. And it gets worryingly close to waving a moralistic finger:

‘See what I told you! If only you were sensible you wouldn’t have got the HIV! You had to go out and have ‘fun’. You had to have a ‘good time’. You couldn’t be happy with a girl. You had to have sex with a man [mouth puke]. There are consequences for that. AIDS! Having a good time got you AIDS!’

It gets dangerously close to Forrest Gump territory where the free-spirited liberal Jenny gets HIV because she won’t do what’s she’s fucking told. It can’t be that Freddie Mercury just had a hedonistic lifestyle with all the good things and bad things that go with that, and that HIV was just a horrible stroke of bad luck that nobody deserved and which no one had coming. No, he has to be fucking miserable and all the fun has to be drained out of his life.

It’s also just fucking weird how this film manages to erase all the sex and drugs out of Mercury’s life. Do we even see him kiss another man? I can’t seem to remember it. If it happens, it’s fleeting. It’s like the film thinks that I’m Mercury’s mother and it doesn’t want to show me the reality of his existence because I’d have a conniption. And the only drugs it seems to show him take are a few pills. He was doing more blow than Scarface! Is this to protect the wee little children who love that song where the guy sings and the people clap their hands and stomp their feet? Fuck those people! This film could have been more engaging, more moving, more uplifting and much funnier if we got all the gory details. Oh no, your dad’s favourite singer liked to snort coke and rim other men? Get over yourself.

These inaccuracies and omissions make me question the truth of pretty much everything in the film. Was Queen’s manager (played by the Irish driver out of Downton Abbey) really that villainous? Was the head of EMI really that much of a dunderhead (the comic stupidity of this character is really over the top)? Did Freddie Mercury really reconcile with his estranged father on the day of Live Aid and bring over a male ‘friend’? And was he even estranged from him in the first place? And did a bunch of fucking chickens really inspire the writing of Bohemian Rhapsody? Honestly, the production of Bohemian Rhapsody is a fucking travesty. Here the film makes Queen seem Spinal Tap. Everything about that sequence is just goofy as hell.

I also hate the opening section of the film. It’s woefully facile. In about ten minutes Freddie Mercury has an argument with his family, watches a student band, joins the band as the lead singer and embarks on a successful tour with them. For a film that’s so long, it’s in such an awful rush to say nothing.

So, besides the musical scenes, is there anything good about the film? Remi Malek gives a strong performance as Mercury, but that’s about it. The slick camerawork and weirdly perfect costumes that look like no one has even worn them, make the movie look like a waxwork museum. It’s a pretty miserable exercise. My suspicion, seeing as the band seemed to have so much control over this project, is that they have strangled all the life out of it; that any controversy has been swept under the rug to protect their ‘legacy’. This is the same band that were so concerned about their image and respecting Queen’s legacy that they hooked up with both Paul Rodgers and Adam Lambert to squeeze every penny out of its dead carcass. Bohemian Rhapsody seems like yet another cynical ploy to make even more money and mythologise the band - to turn them into something they never were. And baffling enough, they’re trying to turn them into a simpler, less interesting version of themselves.

If your fiance was murdered in front of you in a brutal terrorist attack, what would be a reasonable reaction? You’d certainly experience a prolonged period of grief. You’d probably suffer some serious PTSD. You might even abuse alcohol or drugs or even try and kill yourself.

But would you turn into a James Bond figure and try and take out entire terrorist cells single-handed? Yeah, that might be a stretch.

American Assassin could possibly work as some sort of incredibly over the top fantasy fulfillment flick. But instead it’s a boring, cliched, utterly joyless piece of sludge. People smash each other in the face and blood splatters all over the lens, but it’s neither hard hitting nor exhilarating.

I knew this film was in for a rough ride when Michael Keaton turned up and started being all...Michael Keaton. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a fine actor, but he can very easily descend into some lazy, annoying ticks. He has a default crazy mode that he can switch into if he’s not feeling very inspired, and he’s certainly lacking inspiration here.

Keaton’s character has the less than enviable task of turning some milk toast pissant, Jason Bourne wannabe into, er, Jason Bourne. Cue yelling, beating and various boot camp shenanigans. But Keaton’s character is neither Gunnery Sergeant Hartman nor Obi-Wan Kenobi. He just seems to be in a bit of a bad mood all the time, but for no real discernible reason. Maybe he can’t get decent coffee or maybe he rewatched Jack Frost. But no sooner has he started yelling at Baby Bourne than they’re traipsing over Europe.

The plot plays like Donald Trump’s wet dream. Some Iranians, pissed off with their government’s nuclear deal with the US, decide to secretly build their own nuclear bomb so that they can attack Israel. You see, Trump told us that it was a bad deal! Fucking Obama trying to stabilize shit. We should have preemptively nuked those fuckers in case they tried some shit later on down the line.

Complicating matters is the fact is that the building of the nuclear bomb is coordinated by another American assassin. And would you believe it, he’s an ex pupil of Michael Keaton.

This American assassin gone bad is made out to be like the fucking Darth Vader of assassins. He’s just too good but he’s evil as shit. But then he turns up and he’s just an annoying kid with daddy issues. Apparently Keaton’s character acted like this kid was the second coming or something. He bigged him up and inflated his ego. Somewhere along the line, though, things went bad and zzzzzzz....

Oh no, was it a hard job killing people for a living? Was it not quite as easy as it seemed? Now that’s a surprise. But yes, take all of your bitterness and help to create a nuclear bomb. Oh, and then betray your Iranian colleagues and steal the nuclear bomb and attack the American Navy because you have issues with your surrogate daddy! Seriously, what complete and utter garbage this movie is.

The final action scene, I shit you not, involves the new baby Bourne assassin fighting baby Darth Vader in a speedboat as a nuclear bomb ticks down. The tension! The drama! It’s like the end of Face/Off except completely devoid of entertainment.

There’s a hilarious moment, after baby Bourne kills baby Vader, where the kid is alone in a speedboat with the nuclear bomb. ‘What do I do? What do I do?’ It’s like the modern equivalent of those silent movies with the big, round bombs and the fuse burning down. ‘Where do I throw it? Who can I give it to?’ Except it’s a nuke.

Before I go any further, I should mention the fact that there’s a scene where Michael Keaton gets tortured. He has his fingernails ripped off, he gets electrocuted and he gets sliced. And yet he tells baby Vader how much he likes it. Baby Vader almost looks like he’s about to start crying. How am I supposed to take this kid seriously as a threat when he can’t even torture someone properly? And Michael Keaton just Michael Keaton’s his arse off. There he is with no fingernails and yet he looks like he’s having the time of his life. He even manages to sucker the stupid ex pupil and bites piece of his ear off. And yet baby Vader doesn’t kill him. He wants Keaton to witness his master plan. His attack on the US Navy. He’s doing all of this so that he can make Keaton feel bad! It’s the stupidest motivation I’ve seen in a long time. ‘I’m going to torture you...but not kill you. And I’ll going to nuke the US Navy and kill myself...and you’ll feel really bad. Fuck you dad!!!’

And it’s in this post torture state that Keaton begins dangling out the side of a helicopter, yelling at his protege to drop the nuke in the ocean. Which at least stops the absolute ridiculousness of the kid trying to find a place to put the bomb. ‘Maybe if I shove it in the toilet and close the door, everything will be okay!’

So the kid gets airlifted out of the blast radius and the bomb explodes underwater which makes the CGI US Navy wobble a lot. But just when you think it’s all over, there’s the hint that the filmmakers are fishing for a sequel and an inevitable franchise. Quick, let me do a Michael Keaton like in the above screencap.