Just when you thought we’ve had our fill of biopics about music legends from the 1970s, we’re now gifted with BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE. This isn’t the first treatment of the reggae icon. Oscar winning director Kevin Macdonald (ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER; THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND; THE MAURITANIAN) made a documentary about the man and his music back in 2012, which was praised for its depth and electrifying concert footage. BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE, on the other hand, looks at just a few pivotal years in the musician’s short life when Jamaica was on the brink of civil war.

The time is 1976 and Jamaica’s two political factions are at war with each other. Amidst all the violence, Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir, ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI; BARBIE) announces that he will perform a concert of peace, but while they are preparing for the event, he, his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch, NO TIME TO DIE; CAPTAIN MARVEL) and other members of his band are shot by assailants who break into their home. They recover from their injuries but Bob tells Rita to take their children to his mother’s home in Delaware. He and the rest of his band will go to London. While there, Bob experiments with a new sound, which results in his album “Exodus”. It’s a huge success, reaching new audiences all over the world. In 1978, he and the band return to a triumphant homecoming but Bob and Rita’s happiness is short-lived.

I enjoy listening and often singing along to Bob Marley’s songs as much as the next White guy does so I really wanted to give this movie my total love. Unfortunately, BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE doesn’t deliver the goods. Ben-Adir and Lynch, who are both just too pretty for words, give earnest performances and do their best wrapping their tongues around Jamaican English, though they both break their accents from time to time, but the story lets them down with its tragic blandness. No one, well, almost no one wants to see a biopic that runs from birth to death so it was a smart move for director Reinaldo Marcus Green (KING RICHARD) to focus on just two years but he and his cowriters don’t dig very deep into Marley’s creative process. On the contrary, we’re given a slew of music biopic tropes such as a drummer kicking off a beat, followed by a guitarist (the new guy that no one believes will fit in with this close-knit group) plunking out a bass line, then Marley joining in with a melody and words and voilà! “Exodus”, the song, is born. Then there’s record executive Michael Bloom (Michael Gandolfini, OCEAN’S 8), who spars with Bob over the album cover design. (Spoiler: Bob is right.) Or the record albums stacked up in a store that are picked up in rapid succession by customers followed by the obligatory shot showing how high the album reaches on the sales charts. Where haven’t we seen these before?

If you’re only vaguely familiar with Marley’s music, BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE offers a safe introduction to it, though you’re not going to come away with a very good understanding of the man other than that he seemed to be a really nice guy who was a peacemaker in his own way… and that he had a lot of children, both from Rita and a string of other women, though how those baby-daddy children came into being is completely glossed over. Both son Ziggy Marley and Rita serve as the film’s producers and they have been very vocal about how pleased they are with the film. It may be that Green, in order to secure the music rights and the Marley family’s support, had to shut one eye to some of Bob’s foibles.

Very strangely, a decision was made to put English subtitles on the film for the screenings here in Hong Kong except it’s not English. It’s AI-generated English so when Ben-Adir says “I can’t even get peace for myself”, the subtitles say, “I ken even git peace fi misef”. They’re not helpful at all. As one of my colleagues correctly pointed out, when a British person says “water”, we don’t get a subtitle that says “wah-tah” so why this? If the distributor is concerned that non-native English speakers and those who can’t read Chinese subtitles, because we have those up on the screen too, might have trouble understanding the Jamaican patois, then put the correct spelling on the screen. Don’t spell the patois!

BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE opens in Hong Kong tomorrow (March 14th). The movie isn’t bad but it isn’t good either. If you really want to understand Bob Marley, you’re better off buying the soundtrack or watching the documentary.

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