Bob Marley: One Love (NC16)

107 minutes, opens on March 14
3 stars

The story: In a 1976 Jamaica convulsed by factional violence, Bob Marley survived an assassination attempt and, shortly after, self-exiled to Britain, where he recorded his 1977 ground-breaking album Exodus. English actor Kingsley Ben-Adir plays the Jamaican reggae superstar in a dramatisation of those transformative two years that culminate in his 1978 homecoming peace concert.

No single movie can reasonably encompass the greatness of Marley. He was a global icon whose anthems of pan-Africanism united a continent awakening from colonialism into a new reality of civil strife.

The Hollywood biopic Bob Marley: One Love by Reinaldo Marcus Green – the director behind Will Smith’s Best Actor Oscar win for King Richard (2021) – is rudimentary and reverential.

Marley’s children and widow Rita are the producers. Hence, there is no critical reassessment of his legacy, nor any insights into his feelings and thoughts beyond the reggae messiah espousing Rastafarian spirituality.

Now and then, he has flashbacks of his white father’s abandonment. Not even these haunting childhood experiences amount to much.

What hurts is Rita’s fury. Lashana Lynch as the long-suffering spouse – his notorious affairs are given scant mention – and Ben-Adir are so much better than their movie.

Performing backup as Ken #1 in the power ballad I’m Just Ken from Barbie (2023) may seem a dubious dry run, but Ben-Adir gets Marley’s patois and onstage magnetism.

It is galvanising, watching him and The Wailers Band jamming on Exodus. On this soundtrack album are the title number and the monumental hits Jamming and One Love/People Get Ready, and the vocals are Marley’s brought back to life from archived recordings.

Hot take: Ben-Adir and the music give good vibes, even if the unambitious bio-drama fails to satisfy your soul.

Exhuma (NC16)

133 minutes, opens on March 14
2 stars

The story: A wealthy family commissions a star-studded quartet of spiritualists – Choi Min-sik the feng shui master, Yoo Hae-jin a mortician, Kim Go-eun a precocious exorcist and her protege Lee Do-hyun – to dispel an ancestral curse in this paranormal thriller that has scared up over eight million viewers for South Korea’s biggest movie of the year.

K-occult director Jang Jae-hyun conjured the earlier hits The Priests (2015) and Svaha: The Sixth Finger (2019), and the supernatural mystery Exhuma establishes a promising start thick with grey misty menace as the ghostbusters head into a remote mountaintop village.

Their tricky but richly compensated assignment is to appease the troublesome forefather by exhuming his coffin for reburial.

They arrive at a mysterious unmarked grave on sacred ground, which Choi’s geomancer immediately senses is “the vilest plot”.

The grim realism has the tactility of soil and wood central to geomancy’s five elements.

But, for all of Jang’s film-making craft and the actors’ credible performances – grizzled veteran Choi is predictably the standout, and Kim is gutsy and fierce – the story loses its narrative thread once a powerful malevolent entity escapes from the tomb, with deadly consequences.

In this second half, Jang overreaches with a symbolic unearthing of the Korean Peninsula’s traumatic past under Japanese colonisation. A late-appearance samurai demon is inelegantly literal: Slaying this monster, rather than exorcising grandpa, becomes the task at hand.

While Jang is to be commended for his detailed research into Eastern shamanism, there are more than enough rituals involving horse blood, slain chickens and porcine carcasses here to knock out a priest.

Hot take: Great atmosphere and an ensemble cast just as good are squandered on a jumbled story.