Yesterday

The 2019 British romantic comedy, Yesterday, is a prime example of wasted potential. When the trailers surfaced and presented a scenario where a man discovers that the world has suddenly forgotten about The Beatles and then subsequently uses their classic songs as a means of earning fame and recognition, it didn’t wow people or convince them that it was going to be something groundbreaking and new, but there was an idea here that could be fun to explore. Too bad the film did nothing with this potential and honestly wasted everybody’s time in the process.

Jack Malik (played by Himesh Patel) is a failing singer-songwriter who barely makes ends-meet and only seems to have fans within his small friend group, particularly from his long-time best friend and manager, Ellie Appleton (played by Lily James). After deciding to give up on his dreams, a sudden blackout all over the world occurs which causes him to get in a bike accident. After recovering, he is incredibly flabbergasted to learn that the world has no idea who The Beatles are, not finding any of them or their music on any internet search history. He starts to play iconic Beatles songs, passing them off as his own, and this eventually earns him major stardom, even getting attention from pop singer Ed Sheeran and his ruthless manager, Debra Hammer (played by Kate McKinnon) who decides to turn him into a global sensation. Being known as the spontaneous writer who created outstanding music out of nowhere by himself, Jack has risen to a level he never thought he’d achieve, but it has caused a rift between him and Ellie, who has harboured feelings for Jack all this time but now feels inferior next to his new star power. Taking on a fame that doesn’t belong to him and living a life that doesn’t suit him, Jack needs to work around this crazy new world and decide whether or not Lily or the music of The Beatles is more important to him.

Yesterday did fine from a critical standpoint and earned a pretty favorable amount at the box office (as would be expected of any movie that had Beatles music all over it), but most were left pretty underwhelmed by this flick. While not containing anything unwatchable, the poor usage of its concept, aimless direction, bland characters and performances, and its truly terrible script result in a less than stellar experience.

This whole idea originally sparked from a 2012 screenplay written by American writer, Jack Barth, who had failed to sell scripts for several decades and conceived this idea almost as like a tragic reflection of his own situation (with the example being that if the world didn’t know what Star Wars was, he still wouldn’t become popular if he created and ran with the idea). After a few years, British filmmaker Richard Curtis (famous for his work on TV sitcoms like Blackadder, The Vicar of Dibley and Mr. Bean and films like Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones’ Diary, and Love Actually) was shown the idea and decided to rework it into a rom-com with the focus being about if The Beatles disappeared from the world. There is a way to construct this into a picture with a dark comedic edge dosed with a lot of in-jokes and irony, but through a misunderstanding of the intent (it was not supposed to be a success story from Barth’s original idea), diluting the premise by including of rom-com elements and a cliched storyline, and stretching what could only survive as a short film into a proper feature length feature, the final result feels generic, lazy and very disappointing.

There is an idea here about exploring a world where The Beatles never existed and it’s interesting to imagine how the music industry would’ve changed without them, highlighting things like the success of certain genres, artists who maybe wouldn’t exist without their inspiration, and even the perception of ”boy bands” and that form of group dynamic in more modern music, but the film bizarrely feels very uninterested in exploring its concept, and rather just uses it as an excuse to tell a very safe and predictable ‘’rising up the ranks’’ music story. While Curtis has definitely showcased his talents elsewhere, this script is truly awful and takes every opportunity to not only waste whatever good will or intelligence could come from this idea but also fill it with a pointless romantic sub-plot, typical cliches of the genre that feel annoyingly cartoonish, and lines that are very ineffective and even slightly embarrassing. What also doesn’t help is the ill-fitting and bland direction from Danny Boyle. Being a director who’s known for injecting a dream-like, even abstract quality to otherwise grim and realistic stories, he just feels out of place with this film and brings nothing unique to the table. It’s paced fine enough and there are parts where it feels like he’s trying to give it a personality with quirky shots and visual oddities, but it never really clicks.

For a movie that is very focused on The Beatles, they really aren’t involved that much aside from a casual name-drop, despite getting permission from the surviving family members. The movie could work around this if the characters they created were interesting enough that the shadow of what-could’ve-been didn’t smother the project, but that is exactly what happened as a majority of this cast is very poorly used, written, and directed, and a big brunt of that is taken by Himesh Patel as the lead. Still a relatively newcomer whose only big starring role was in the popular British soap opera, Eastenders, Patel is asked to take on the task of leading a film with an under-cooked idea, a generic script, and distractingly bland direction, so it’s no wonder he turned out the way he did. As a lead, he is quite boring, unlikeable, and barely leaves any impression whatsoever, with line reads that sound like they’re being read while half asleep, a character that has zero personality and seems to have shaky ethics to say the least, and a narrative direction that feels like it’s dictating his decisions rather than the character making chooses for himself. He’s not even written as scummy enough to make his actions of essentially committing musical fraud in order to get famous, fully hateable, instead feeling like a generic NPC in a video game that only spouts occasional lines when he’s interacted with. The only reason it feels like he was chosen was due to his singing, and he does perform these covers very well with a sound that feels akin to that of The Beatles, but still different enough that it doesn’t feel like a beat for beat remix.

The rest of the cast isn’t done that much better and is really held down by the poor scripting leaving them as very one-note roles, but from an acting standpoint, nobody is really that bad (except for Ed Sheeran, but he’s a singer so it’s not that surprising). Lily James is actually decently likeable as the lead’s manager and is gifted the privilege of housing a personality in a film where pretty much no one has one, but her connections to the dumb romance limits her purpose to just being a love-interest, people like Joel Fry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal, Sarah Lancashire, and Justin Edwards are fine, but have so little to work with that they never stand out as characters, Robert Carlyle does decently as a version of one of the Beetles members, but his scene plus a lot of his lines are overly cheesy and can feel a little manipulative, and Kate McKinnon can be very talented and funny if used right, but her as this one-note musical producer is so poorly done that it feels like she’s just trolling the movie with how random and forcibly over-the-top she is in moments (no one who says ‘’stop in the name of money’’ is taking a film seriously).

Yesterday is a very bland film to look at, as while you can feel in certain moments where it’s trying to have an identity through its visuals, it’s never pushed far enough to really give the movie an identity. It will have instances where it will have these large headings for location and even a moment where several tv screen surround the lead in a dramatic fashion, yet none of these elements are strong enough to help push the film into developing a distinct style, but they are also just forceful enough that it prevents it from feeling like it is solely in the realm of reality.

The cinematography by Christopher Ross is in one part very safe and generic, with stereotypical straight-faced shots that don’t bring much of a visual language to the movie, and in another part very distracting with a lot of random tilted angles put in places where they shouldn’t be, and it just feels like Ross and Boyle are forcing in random stylistic choices because of their own personal styles rather than because it matches the story they’re telling. The musical score by Daniel Pemberton at first seems like it’s going to have a bit of pep and life to it, but as the film keeps going, it starts to feel less and less noticeable and just becomes background noise. The actual performances are sung very well and do make for nice covers but aren’t used in a way that might illicit a hint of character or feel like they bring dimension to the events that are unfolding, rather just solely being used for fan service.

Yesterday came and went without a second thought and, unlike the band it’s basing its premise on, not a lot of people are going to care that they forgot about it (although if the worst thing that happens in a world without The Beatles is no coke, cigarettes, or Harry Potter, it’s not that big a loss). There are much more offensive rom coms out there that will make you groan, wince, and feel pain, but this one’s mere minuscule presence makes it one that barely offers anything worthwhile and therefore stands as far more offensive for not even doing right by its genre or premise. The directing is stale, the writing is terrible, the acting is wooden and generic, and instead of actively dissecting the premise it has and trying to understand how a world could be altered if a very famous music group was removed entirely, it just used it as a crux to get across a by-the-numbers music story under the guise of something sappier and manipulative. Troubles are definitely not far away from this film, and it’s safe to say nobody really believed in Yesterday.