Anne Hathaways Psycho-Horror: Over-the-Top and Tiresome

Mother Mary (15, 112 mins)

Rating: Two out of five stars 

Verdict: Heavens above 

Michael (12A, 127 mins)

Rating: Two out of five stars 

Verdict: Dishonest biopic 

Picture an annoyingly wacky perfume commercial stretched beyond tolerance to almost two hours, and you have some idea of what Mother Mary looks and feels like.

A grandiose psychodrama with supernatural horror elements (and original songs by Charli XCX), it stars as a troubled pop icon in urgent need of a new dress for her stage comeback.

Hathaway plays the titular Mother Mary, seemingly modelled on Taylor Swift, with bits of Lady Gaga and Madonna thrown in. She's an American superstar who has used the near-religious zealotry of her fans to shape her act, wearing a halo and belting out hits with titles like Holy Spirit while gyrating at the heart of a troupe of backing dancers.

But we meet a reduced version of Mary, turning up bedraggled and needy at the home of her English former dress designer (and, it is hinted, lover) Sam, played by Michaela Coel.

Mary's show is only three days away, giving Sam very little time to produce the dress. But that does at least enable her to make Mary suffer, retribution for the wounds she sustained herself when their relationship fell apart.

With more subtlety, that could easily be the premise for an engrossing tale. After all, Paul Thomas Anderson's wonderful Phantom Thread (2017) showed how much material there can be in couture.

But writer-director David Lowery overdoes it, with needless body-horror and even a ghost – a lady in red who looks like she might have emerged from one of Chris de Burgh's wilder nightmares. Basically, he gives us too much phantom and not enough thread.

Lowery ventured into similar territory with 2017's greatly superior A Ghost Story, a small masterpiece, but here, his tiresomely overwritten dialogue asks too much of his leads.

Coel in particular gives an insufferably mannered performance, especially during an extended two-hander in Sam's studio, with the two women solemnly trading wordy exchanges as if they were playing tennis with a thesaurus. A pair of Roger Federers, if you will. And when they run out of syllables, the circumlocutions take on another form.

'I want what you want, but I want you to want it for the right reasons,' says Mary, which frankly made me want to wonder if anyone else in the auditorium wanted what I wanted, which was to run for the exit.

Michael is the story of a real pop icon, but not the whole story. Indeed, anyone who saw Donald Trump's social-media post depicting the US President as a Christ-like figure might be reminded of it by this Michael Jackson biopic, which does for the late King of Pop what Trump was trying to do for himself.

It shows Jackson as truly messianic, a golden orb in human form, dispensing love, charity and, of course, dazzling entertainment.

As so often with music biopics, the clue to the content lies in the credits. Six of the executive producers bear the surname Jackson, and so does the leading man. There is not the teeniest hint that this version of Michael – played with a mega-watt smile by his nephew Jaafar – might have done anything in his private life more unsavoury than kissing his pet llama.

Admittedly, the film only takes us up to 1988, but a final caption confirms that a follow-up is planned. Will the next one fully explore all the rumours of child molestation and the reported $25 million Jackson paid to settle out of court with the family of Jordan Chandler, the 13-year-old boy who made credible allegations of sexual abuse? I shouldn't be presumptuous, but I'm guessing probably not.

Here, director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter John Logan tell Jackson's story without lumbering us with anything as challenging as nuance or ambiguity.

It begins in Gary, Indiana, in 1966. 'Y'all wanna work in a steel mill like me for the rest of your days?' thundered father Joe, as he forces his sons to rehearse their act over and over, and takes a belt to anyone who dissents.

It is the earliest salvo in a barrage of exposition, which continues when the baby of the Jackson 5, eight-year-old Michael, reads Peter Pan aloud to himself in bed. 'Neverland was finally free,' he exclaims, sweetly. That's the script referring, with a nod and a wink, to the ranch he would eventually buy, with only the cynics among us reminded of the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, about two men who claimed that Jackson abused them as children.

In that inconvenient way of pushy parents in biopics, Joe's brow-beating pays off. By 1969, the Jackson 5 are in Los Angeles wowing the father of Motown, Berry Gordy (Larenz Tate), and from there the film plods through the major developments in Michael's extraordinary career: going solo, having nose surgery, firing Joe (in a brutal one-line fax from his new manager John Branca, played by Miles Teller), and the traumatic episode during a 1984 Pepsi commercial shoot when his hair catches fire.

In fairness, Jaafar Jackson (son of Jermaine) gives a compelling performance as his late uncle. He's not much of an actor. But in looks, voice and dance moves, he really couldn't be a better match.

The storytelling is simplistic, the omissions egregious, but $200 million (the estimated budget) sure buys a fabulous karaoke act.

Both films are in cinemas now. A review of Michael ran in Wednesday's paper.