Being an “influential” film isn’t always a good thing, and to clarify what I mean, I point to the unreasonably influential 2018 musical biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. The cultural damage caused by this inexplicably billion-dollar grossing film about Freddie Mercury can be felt to this day in the endless string of copy-cats which have come in its wake and continue to terrorise our screens (need we remind ourselves about Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody?). An equally damaging ramification of Rami Malik's mystifying Best Actor Oscar win in 2019 is Bradley Cooper's continued pursuit of said award given his loss on that fateful night - had he deservingly won in place of Malik for A Star Is Born, perhaps we'd have been spared Cooper's ongoing obsession with taking home this top acting prize.

And so we have the latest in the cursed list of Bohemian Rhapsody-emulators in the form of Back To Black, Sam Taylor-Johnson's directorial effort which attempts to tell the tragic tale of the iconic British songstress Amy Winehouse. The same story beats are present that we've come to expect from these type of movies - raw talent is exhibited at an early age, meteoric success is quickly achieved, the tragic downfall eventually transpires - but there's something about Back To Black that feels especially exploitative in comparison to its peers. Perhaps it's the fact that Winehouse never really got to tell her own story as her life cut so cruelly short at the tender age of 27. Or the fact that she so openly detested the media frenzy that surrounded her like leeches with the blood that fed them being her personal misadventures rather than talent or music.

And it's true; she would have absolutely abhorred this film. It exploits her struggle for the entertainment of others, just as she so desperately hated. Back To Black is one last circling of her corpse by vultures after a lifetime of being the subject of the feast. Outside of the questionable morals of a picture like this, the filmmaking is inexcusably poor. The script is surface-level and exposition-filled, poisoned with unrealistic, plot-driven conversations pedaling a story that fails to properly interrogate how crushingly let down and exploited Amy was by those who were meant to protect her. The film looks bland, with the colourful, urban-jungle that is Camden robbed entirely of its character and personality, and the direction is unmemorable, failing miserably to capture the typically enigmatic Winehouse and the world that she inhabited.

In the central role of Amy herself is a reasonable effort from Marisa Abela. It wouldn't be fair for her questionable performance to grind her career to a halt - she's solid in television's industry, and there are moments, however brief, in which glimpses of Amy can be found in her performance. There are flashes of Amy's magnetism, sparks of that insane rizz and brazen cheek, and when they appear, the film becomes briefly watchable for a moment. Then they disappear. But Marisa was doomed to fail from the start. It's just not possible to capture the magic of Amy Winehouse on screen in this way. She was a force of nature, completely inimitable, so strikingly unlike any of her peers with an exhilarating magic in her eyes that cannot be copied.

Back To Black is simply a film which need not exist. We know Amy had a troubled life, and we know she struggled terribly with an addiction that would eventually kill her, but what good is it to see it retold in televsion movie quality? If one wants to engage with Amy Winehouse and her story, then I would advise returning to her timeless pair of albums, “Frank” and “Back To Black”. That's where Amy's voice can be heard most authentically, the music itself being the rare instance in her tortured life where she was in charge of how her story was told - and what a once-in-a-lifetime voice it was.