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 One Night in Miami Movie Review

One Night in Miami is a 2020 historical drama film directed by Regina King and starring Kingsley Ben-Adir and Aldis Hodge among many other actors. It’s such a weak movie.

On the night of Feb. 25, 1964, in Miami, Cassius Clay joins Jim Brown, Sam Cooke and Malcolm X, and they discuss the responsibility of being successful black men during the civil rights movement. From the get-go, I really dislike this type of storytelling. Basically, what the filmmakers have done here is entirely fabricate the meeting between all these men with all dialogue being imagined. I really do not approve of this meddling with history as it’s pointless and simply a lie.

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With that being said, even if I were to forgive for that false narrative, I still found it quite mediocre. It is rare for me to not care for a chamber drama, but that is exactly what happened here. It’s stagey and it’s full of conversations and discussions, but something about it seemed wrong, and not just the false nature of the narrative, but also the many overly typical moments and points of view that we have seen so many times before in many much better movies.

Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke are the best depicted personalities here and the acting overall is terrific, but Leslie Odom Jr. and Kingsley Ben-Adir are the clear standouts. Most of this cast isn’t all that well-known, so the only thing that I would like to see this movie succeed in is get these actors more work.

But I personally could not connect to any of these characters as so much of the film’s emphasis is put into Islam, which in my opinion is such a horrible, hateful religion, and seeing all of this arguing for it really annoyed me. I did not care about this subject matter and the rest of the conversations that they had are again the case of been there, done that. As for Regina King, she might be a good actress, but a strong director she is not. The direction here is poor and directionless to be frank and the whole movie isn’t cinematic, isn’t exciting and the pacing is so slow that it ended up being an utter chore to watch.

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One Night in Miami is about all these famous black men having a meeting in the sixties, so of course those brainwashed liberal critics were always going to lavish praise upon it. In actuality though, it’s a giant mediocrity of a movie that is very well acted, I will give it that, but the direction from Regina King is poor and directionless while the pacing is so bad that the movie is a chore to sit through. Worst of all, their many discussions aren’t all that interesting while the whole fabricated nature of this entire storyline really bothered me.

My Rating – 2.5