Embodying the life story of James Brown, a famous singer, who throughout his life, faces many challenges and obstacles, according to his family's lower class, the thing that effects on his personality. He shows the true meaning of determination, as he manages to achieve a great success through this bad life.
Musically explosive, emotionally powerful and flat-out funky, Get on Up tells the outrageous life story of James Brown with a quirky brilliance worthy of the man at its center.
The storytelling is mostly linear, with some confusing back-and-forth in the chronology, and it's a long slog. The Brown who emerges from this film has a monstrous ego to go with his monster talent.
As prodigious a talent as Prince was, he only altered the funk. The megalithic, trail-blazing talent of James Brown birthed it. And Chadwick Boseman nails the telling of it.
Though "Get On Up" never congeals into a satisfactory whole, its fragmentary portrait of the singer at the height of his fame - intercut with his troubled single-parent childhood - effectively shows his invasive power in popular culture.
More often, the film skates along the surface of Brown's contradictory character. Now if it skated like Brown's dance moves glided onstage, that really would have been something.
The Film Stage
March 26, 2016
Boseman is the highlight, of course, and Taylor is smart to keep his leading man front-and-center in every, single scene.
