Get On Up – 5

A mess of a movie, somewhat salvaged by an extraordinary performance by Chadwick Boseman. A bunch of disconnected scenes add up, dramatically, to nothing. The scenes of James Brown’s youth, weakly reminiscent of the much better Ray, explain little, although one is rather surprised that as a youth he had no rhythm and couldn’t carry a tune. You want to root for the hero, but it’s hard when, as in Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic, he has so many troubling personal characteristics. And then there is the Dan Aykroyd problem: trained on SNL he can create a character but he can’t act. In short, nothing in the film is terribly satisfying, including the flashback editing, designed to hide the dramatic deficiencies, except for Boseman’s electrifying impersonation of Mr. Dynamite, the hardest-working man in show business (also not evident). He was stellar in 42 and Oscar-nomination-worthy here, for his acting, his dancing, and even his hairstyles.

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