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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.
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.
August 01, 2014
New Yorker
Chadwick Boseman gives a startling and galvanic performance.
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.