WEMBLEY STADIUM — “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a movie that has been a long time coming.

It has been advertised for what seems like an eternity now. At one point, I wasn’t even sure it was going to happen to be honest. With early rumors of actors dropping out of casting and a change of directors toward the end of the film it is a miracle it happened at all.

I have to admit I was interested in this film from the beginning, not because I am any true fan of the band or the music, but because I was interested to see how Freddie Mercury would be portrayed and if his monumental personality could be captured in this film well enough to make it work.

If the film could get Mercury right, you might have something worth seeing. If not, nothing would save it.

It was the gamble this film took that fascinated me before I saw it, and it is the payoff that has kept me thinking about it for a week since I have seen it.

Here is what worked and what didn’t in "Bohemian Rhapsody":

Rami Malek inhabits Freddie Mercury

I have often wondered which is more difficult as an actor: portraying an actual person or giving a fictional character believability people will care about. I don’t think there is an easy answer to this question — both sound like a risky prospect and can be disastrous if not done right.

Portraying a personality as big as Freddie Mercury's and getting it wrong would have made for an uncomfortable 135-minute-long train wreck to watch. Fortunately for us, Rami Malek more than captured Mercury’s personality — he channeled it.

His performance outshines nearly every other aspect of the film, save for the music itself. It doesn’t happen often that we get to see an actor inhabit a character so fully that we forget who the actor is. Malek as Mercury did this for me. Not once was I taken out of the fantasy by Malek’s performance.

I genuinely looked forward to every scene he was in, to the point I felt the loss of not having the real Freddie Mercury around anymore.

The soundtrack is killer

Queen's biggest songs were the focus of this film, which in many ways gave the movie legs to run on, but in other ways held the film back.

The film was a great way to show what went into the most iconic songs of Queen’s catalog and how they came to life. With Brian May as the movie's producer, I have no doubt that the stories behind the songs are mostly true.

The music as the backdrop to the story of Queen and Mercury was an excellent device used to tell the bigger story. We get this in a fantastic scene between Freddie Mercury and his wife, where he explains what it was like to hear the largest paying concert crowd in history singing the song he had written for her back to him.

The individual songs in this film were used as flags to mark the major moments of the band's life, which was brilliant.

Where the song selection held the film back is that it did nothing to introduce audiences to any of the other great music Queen created that did not happen to make it on to the radio. I think more hardcore fans of Queen will be disappointed in the fact that a broader cross-section of music is not represented.

It's one-dimensional

Without Malek playing Mercury, this film would have not have been much more than a movie-length cliché of so many other films we have seen about the rise and fall of great people.

Although this film was focused on Freddie Mercury, it failed to give the other members of the band much of a voice. Often the individual members of the band and those closest to Mercury were used as backboards to bounce dialogue off of.

As the film progressed and situations became more complex, the characters and dialogue did not deepen, and instead, we got the same predictable responses that are no longer enough to be interesting. This is unfortunate because we know how dynamic each one of the band members was outside of their careers as musicians.

Conclusion

It isn’t often I have to take a full week to know how I feel about a movie after I have seen it. I usually know immediately why I liked or did not like a film.

With “Bohemian Rhapsody,” I had a difficult time trying to figure out exactly how I felt about the film. Over a week later and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the movie and what made it work so well despite itself.

I think it comes down two things: music and Malek. Without such a great body of music put together by such an innovative band and the outsized personality of Freddie Mercury portrayed by Malek, I would have forgotten about this movie before I had to write the review.

I highly recommend seeing the film for those two reasons, you will walk out having been entertained and having seen what I think is the best acting performance of the year so far.

"Bohemian Rhapsody is rated PG-13 for thematic elements, suggestive material, drug content and language. Check KSL.com on Friday for John Clyde's parents content guide for the movie.

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