Can we please stop making all musical biopics the exact same movie? I'm so bored of the template. Instead of coming off as a celebration of Whitney Houston's life and career, I found "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" to be a hollow attempt at re-creating the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody". The strategy the filmmakers took on? Re-make "Bohemian Rhapsody" beat-for-beat with a Whitney Houston focus instead of Queen. This movie is painfully generic, it really disappointed me. And it's not even like the movie itself is bad, it is just that we've seen so many music biopics recently - and they all have the same story! Say what you will about "Elvis" but at least Baz Luhrmann tried to do something different with that one stylistically. Here, everything was bland, there was nothing to make this stand out from the crowd. The generic nature of this film would be fine if this was a better film, but unfortunately because this is so similar to other music biopics, it just comes off as repetitive and inferior in both performance and filmmaking.
Naomi Ackie is fine as Whitney, but she never really elevated the material off the page or made me believe she was Whitney. Instead I just saw her trying to be the next Rami Malek and Austin Butler, and personally I don't think she is quite on that level yet as an actor.
The movie also felt very shallow, it never went deep into exploring Whitney's life, instead just went from scene to scene checking off the boxes of major events in Whitney's life, carefully following the template of the music biopic. The script really was not anything special, and honestly I found it didn't work as a narrative at all. There was no conflict, no tension, nothing to keep me invested as an audience member. It is true to life, Whitney was indeed very talented and her talent was recognized from the start, but in a story you need your protagonist to go through some sort of struggle. I never felt Whitney ever hit any obstacles here, aside from minor relationship and substance-abuse struggles that it barely touched on. It literally just felt like the movie was going through the motions, complete with a finale that featured an iconic performance from Whitney.
I'm sorry, I know I am really ripping into this film, but I am just so disappointed that it did nothing to make itself stand out from the rest of music biopics. It felt like no one behind the camera was trying to make it special. Frankly, Whitney Houston deserves so much better.
I'm sure for most audience members, this will be enjoyable! It has an A cinemascope and a very high audience score on rotten tomatoes, so I am definitely in the minority. It is a very likeable movie, I just took major issues with how generic it was. I've seen this same movie countless times before, I'm just so bored with the format. The movie was good, just good, and I wanted it to be great. It should have been great. At least the music was...
