On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 62% based on 335 reviews, and an average rating of 6.1/10. The website’s critical consensus reads: “Bohemian Rhapsody hits a handful of high notes, but as an indepth look at a beloved band, it offers more of a medley than a true greatest hits collection.” On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 49 out of 100, based on 50 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “A” on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported filmgoers gave it an 88% positive score and a 75% “definite recommend”. The critical response to Bohemian Rhapsody made it the worstreviewed film to win a Best Picture award at the Golden Globe Awards since Out of Africa in 1986.
Owen Gleiberman of Variety wrote: “Rami Malek does a commanding job of channeling Freddie Mercury’s flamboyant rock-god bravura, but Bryan Singer’s middle-of-the-road Queen biopic rarely lives up to the authenticity of its lead performance.” Paul Whitington, writing for the Irish Independent, gave the film 3/5 stars, saying: “Bohemian Rhapsody is not big on subtlety: it tells Freddie’s story loudly, taking dramatic shortcuts, over-neatly conflating events and reducing most of the surrounding characters to single dimensions. Some of the dialogue’s a bit heavy-handed too, but I must say I was thoroughly entertained.” For the Evening Standard, Craig McLean wrote: “Bohemian Rhapsody is triumphant entertainment. The post-production special effects have done their job: the Live Aid scenes are convincingly epic. The actors have done their job, too, notably Malek, who oozes pure Mercury.” For Time, Stephanie Zacharek wrote: “In strict filmmaking terms, Bohemian Rhapsody is a bit of a mess. Some of its scenes connect awkwardly, and it hits every beat of disaster and triumph squarely, like a gong. Yet if it has many of the problems we associate with ‘bad’ movies, it has more ragged energy than so many good ones, largely because of Rami Malek’s performance as Mercury, all glitter and muscle and nerve endings.” She described it as “a movie for sensualists, not quality-control experts”.
Chief Guardian pop critic Alexis Petridis described the portrayal of Mercury as “sanitised”, writing: “Bohemian Rhapsody is a film that plays so fast and loose with the truth, it ends up seeming faintly ridiculous: you start out nitpicking about minor chronological errors… and end up with your jaw on the floor.” Guardian film critic Steve Rose described it as a “rock slog with a troubling moralistic subtext”. Although he praised Malek’s performance, David Ehrlich of IndieWire gave the film a grade of “D+”, criticising Singer’s direction and calling the film “royally embarrassing”. He wrote: “Queen’s music may have been unclassifiable, but their movie is as trite and textbook as it gets.” He described the film as a “terrible and self-indulgent piece of revisionist history, where the legend is always prioritized over the truth, even when the truth was surely far more interesting.” For The Spectator, Jasper Rees described Bohemian Rhapsody as “a succession of predigested clichés”, writing “you are overcome by the sapping impression that almost nothing happened the way it’s being presented.” He concluded: “The costumes and wigs are splendid, and the songs are still up to snuff. But this homage to a showman is more famine than feast.” Olly Richards wrote for Empire that the film was “a safe, competent, decidedly non-scandalous biopic. It treats the life of Freddie Mercury with cautious affection, happy to play within the rules when depicting a man who did anything but.” However, he described Malek as “spectacular”, concluding: “If the script hits a lot of bum notes, Malek is always perfectly in key.”
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote: “In struggling to make a salable PG-13 movie out of an R-rated rock life, Bohemian Rhapsody leaves you feeling that something essential and elemental is missing”, but said to put Malek “high on the list for best film performances of 2018” and the actor “digs so deep into the role that we can’t believe we’re not watching the real thing.” Dave Calhoun wrote for Time Out: “It boasts a film-stealing, possessed performance by Rami Malek, who pouts, struts and quips as Mercury, turning the rest of the cast into bit-part players… The movie, though catchy and often seductive, is an act of brazen myth-making. Facts and chronology are tossed aside in favour of a messianic storyline… Much is left out, or fiddled with.” He added “don’t expect anything more than a safe gloss over the Queen tale… its attitude toward sex and drugs is coy and uncomfortably close to the small-world thinking it claims to dismiss.” Despite calling the film “uneven,” Chicago Tribune film critic Katie Walsh stated: “Malek keeps it going with his sheer will and talent.” In a negative movie review, Soumya Srivastava of the Hindustan Times still asserted that the character was “played to a toothy perfection by Rami Malek.” Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post was less impressed with Malek’s performance, writing: “It’s a surface-level performance — physically galvanizing, but with no substance.”
The film also received criticism for its portrayal of Mercury’s gay relationships. Aja Romano wrote for Vox: “What it really wants to be is a Queen concert, and what it really wants Freddie Mercury to be is a rock god instead of a real, queer human man. The result is far more hurtful than your average unconsciously homophobic film. Bohemian Rhapsody is a movie that consciously tries to position a gay man at its center while strategically disengaging with the ‘gay’ part as much as it can, flitting briefly over his emotional and sexual experiences and fixating on his platonic relationship with an exgirlfriend instead.” Likewise, Olly Richards wrote: “There are some poor, strange choices when deciding where to focus, not least committing so much time to his relationship with Mary Austin and virtually none to any happy gay relationship, romantic or otherwise.” Owen Gleiberman wrote that the film “treats Freddie’s personal life – his sexualromantic identity, his loneliness, his reckless adventures in gay leather clubs – with kid-gloves reticence, so that even if the film isn’t telling major lies, you don’t feel you’re fully touching the real story either.”
On the film’s critical reviews, Brian May responded: “The mistake that critics made was reviewing the trailer instead of reviewing the film. They jumped to conclusions. Once people stake their claim, it’s hard for them to withdraw.”
Queen 