Film reviews: Bob Marley: One Love - people get ready, to be disappointed

**

The Promised Land (15)

***

The hokey demands of the music biopic do a disservice to the titular subject of Bob Marley: One Love, a disjointed, officially sanctioned retelling of the reggae superstar’s all-too-brief life and career. Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard), the whole project seems unsure of whether it wants to be a comprehensive womb-to-the-tomb trawl through his life, a Marlon James-esque interrogation of the 1976 assassination attempt that put Marley at the centre of the politicised gang wars tearing his native Jamaica apart, or a Bohemian Rhapsody-style exercise in musical cosplay building up to a legendary concert performance.

It blows the last of these options by heavily trailing Marley’s 1978 homecoming show, the One Love Peace Concert in Jamaica, only to relegate the gig itself to a newsreel epilogue of short archival clips and intertitles proclaiming its importance. In between, the film dispenses with the botched assassination early and proceeds to spend the bulk of its mercifully brief running time focused on the subsequent exile of Marley (played by British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir) to London where he writes and records 1977’s ground-breaking Exodus album with his band The Wailers.

With the endorsement of the Marley family, the film’s ability to use Marley’s original recordings is both selling point and crutch, providing tantalising snippets of musical genius neatly packaged into derivative moments of creative myth-making. It doesn’t help that Green and his trio of screenwriters (among them The Wolf of Wall Street writer Terence Winter) have no feel period specifics, imagining the London of 1977 as a cultural theme park through which Marley can wander in a ganja haze: taking in an inventory of race riots, racist bobbies on the beat and an obligatory gig by The Clash, one filled with National Front skinheads — an anomalous-seeming detail given The Clash were a famously anti-fascist group and had already begun incorporating reggae into their sound by this point. (About Eric Clapton’s drunken endorsement of Enoch Powell the previous year the film remains strangely silent given Clapton had scored a US number one with his cover of Marley’s I Shot the Sheriff three years earlier.)

Bland flashbacks to Marley’s teenage years in Jamaica (where he’s played by Quan-Dajai Henriques) further disrupts the flow as the film inadequately grapples with the impact of his mixed-race parentage, his embrace of Rastafarianism and his childhood bond with future wife Rita, whose role in the 1970s-set segments (when she’s played by Lashana Lynch) is yet another variation of that hoary old biopic cliché: the long-suffering wife sidelined by her husband’s artistic genius.

Still, it’s a measure of Lynch’s underexploited star power that she manages to be the highlight of a film that’s so indifferent to her character’s plight it doesn’t even make a big deal of Rita surviving the bullet that Marley’s would-be killers fire into her head. As for Kingsley Ben-Adir, the rising Brit star makes a decent fist of capturing the nuances of Marley’s patois-laden delivery. He can sing a bit too, which just makes it more frustrating it doesn’t give him more performance scenes. Instead the film asks us to take on faith what should have been this film's chief pleasure: the chance to see the artistry and innovation that helped make Marley a legend dramatised on screen.

It’s too bad the distributors of Danish period drama The Promised Land have opted for such a generic-sounding international title rather than a literal translation of its homegrown moniker ‘Bastarden’.‘The Bastard’, after all, doesn’t just reflect the status of its protagonist — an illegitimately born high-ranking soldier (Mads Mikkelsen). It also evokes the relentlessly bleak mood, harsh landscapes and intractable characters at the heart of this pitiless, violent story about said protagonist’s attempt to tame the Heath of Jutland, a vast stretch of barren, unworkable land that successive Danish kings have been determined to settle with the aim of enriching the nation’s coffers.

Set in the mid-18th century, the film takes shape around Mikkelsen’s Ludvig Kahlen, who takes on the heath-taming challenge for no money, just the promise of a title befitting his 25 years of brutal military service. Scene after scene of the weather-beaten, battle-hardened Kahlen stoically, yet fruitlessly, working the land tells us all we need to know about his unshakeable resolve. Yep, he’s one tough bastard, but even he realises he can’t go it alone and, after a deadly encounter with a band of thieves, he acquires an adoptive daughter of sorts in local Romani girl Anmai Mus (Melina Hagberg), then recruits a pair of fugitive farmers (Morten Hee Andersen and Amanda Collin) who’ve escaped the servant-torturing wrath of local nobleman Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg). Together they start making painfully slow progress, but de Schinkel’s own desire to acquire the land to consolidate his regional power gains Kahlen a psychopathic nemesis who will likewise stop at nothing to get what he wants.

Directed by Nikolaj Arcel, who previously worked with Mikkelsen on the 2012 period film A Royal Affair, the film clearly fancies itself as a Nordic There Will Be Blood and, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s demented tale of avarice, the battle of wills at its core does indeed get viscerally violent before all is said and done. But for all the grisly injury detail that follows, its savagery can’t disguise the simplistic, old-fashioned, Western morality running through it, with Mikkelson magnetic as ever as a sort of Scandi John Wayne, belatedly realising this world is no place for a guy like him.

Bob Marley One Love and The Promised Land are in cinemas now