The Cast of Characters:
	Michael Jackson. Basically playing himself. Like Gamera, he is friend to all children everywhere in the world, especially in the "Smooth Criminal" segment in which he saves the world from drugs by turning into a car [!], a robot [!!], and a spaceship [!!!], and dancing a lot and killing a bunch of guys led by...
	Mr. Big (Joe Pesci). Pesci at his Pesci-est. Wants to get all the kids in the world hooked on drugs. Jackson's version of a Comic Book Villain.
	Katy (Kellie Parker). So adorable, she even has a talking teddy bear. Main function is to get kidnapped and cry out for Michael a lot more than is really necessary.
	Sean (Sean Lennon). John's younger son and a Jackson buddy at the time. Has no real plot purpose except to root for Michael.
	Zeke (Brandon Parker). Same as Sean, although he also makes an appearance earlier in the film impersonating Michael during an all-kiddie version of "Bad". This involves him grabbing his crotch a lot, just like the real Michael. Make of that what you will.
	A bunch of Claymation critters. They almost steal the film in their one segment, mostly by displaying acting ability that puts the rest of the cast (save for Pesci) completely to shame.

Aside from singing the theme to Ben (1971), an appearance with the Jackson 5 in the concert film Save the Children (1973), and his role as the Scarecrow in The Wiz (1978), Michael Jackson hadn't had much experience in film by the time he hit massive solo success in the early 1980's. Because he rose to fame largely on the strength of his music videos, movie stardom seemed to many like a natural next step. The problem was that the most natural genre for him—the musical—was going out of style just then. (Ironically, this was mainly due to MTV.)

Due to his wispy persona, Michael wasn't suited to many roles, so it took a while for him to try for a big screen project (though he did play the title role in the Disney theme-park film Captain EO in 1986). In 1987, he started work on an extended-length video for "Smooth Criminal", one of the tracks off his new album Bad.

Reports in People magazine from that year suggest "Smooth Criminal" was originally meant to be a stand-alone piece, but it apparently became big enough that Jackson decided to build a whole movie around it. The movie, Jackson said, would consist of several segments drawn from the same album. (Not an unusual development; Fantasia started out as just the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment until it got so elaborate that Walt Disney decided to make it part of a larger film, which would earn its cost back faster than one short could.)

The result was this $22 million film (a big budget for 1988) that was released theatrically... in Europe and Asia. In the United States, however, Frank DiLeo (Jackson's manager at the time) couldn't get a distribution deal that was big enough to please the Gloved One. So instead, it went straight-to-video. And you know what that means...

The movie begins with a shot of feet walking across the screen, and they're clad in a familiar pair of black shoes and sparkly socks. In keeping with the tone of pretentious special effects that will dominate the movie, the socks give off bright little sparks as the feet walk along. Then the feet suddenly come up on tiptoes, there's a big loud synthesizer blare, and a logo for Michael Jackson appears.

This leads right into the first segment, which is a live performance of "Man in the Mirror", the first and probably the best of Jackson's solo "save the world" songs. For those keeping track of Jackson's standard quirky performance tics, this one features a lot of his "tugging on my collar to get my soul into it" move.

The visuals cut between Jackson performing in various international venues on the Bad tour, and stock footage of suffering and saving around the world through the years. The latter was what comprised the entire music video for this song on MTV (Jackson appeared only in one crowd shot).

This version, on the other hand, gives us lots of footage of crying, screaming, and devoted fans, and it seems intent on elevating Jackson's stature to that of the people in the stock footage (JFK, MLK, Gandhi, John Lennon, etc.) and it comes off as a touch egotistical. Sadly, this is only the beginning of the self-deification that would define much of Jackson's career from this point onward.

And while many of these clips seemed powerful at the time, now they just come across as awkward and dated. For instance, we see the signing of the Camp David Accords, Reagan shaking hands with Gorbachev, and even a shot of Lech Walesa (I doubt many people reading this will recall the name, much less why he was famous in the first place). We also get a very weird shot of Michael leading what looks like members of an Eastern European commando force. Oh, and I hope you like the 24-style split-screen effect this bit uses, because the next segment has a lot more of it.

As the song ends, Jackson stands on the stage, sincere and sweaty, with his arms outstretched. As the camera pulls back, we fade to his dressing room. We pan over assorted knickknacks representing career highlights, while various faked news reports comment on Michael from off-screen. Oddly, one of them references the notorious Pepsi commercial incident when his hair caught fire, which I wouldn't count as a personal highlight. There's also a real Ronald Reagan speech commenting on Michael's "American Dream" success which comes across as rather sad now.

This leads into a lengthy (ten minutes or so) "video retrospective" of most of his hit songs, starting with "Music and Me", which is played as a TV set shows old home movies of the young Jacksons. To continue the theme of Michael running with groups of uniformed men, this also contains a weird shot of Michael surrounded with police [?]. We pull back and find that the TV set is now floating in space [!]. The TV set then actually sprouts wings [!!] and takes off like a spaceship.

Yes, perhaps realizing that just showing perfectly fine—if old—performance clips in a montage was going to come across as a bit dull, the filmmakers gussy up most of them with added visuals.

There are too many clips here to fully discuss, but here are some examples: "ABC" gets a clay-animated treatment. "Ben" actually reminds us that Jackson's first solo hit is a song sung to a rat. Michael performs "Dancing Machine" on a TV while a stop-motion robot imitates his movements. And let's just say we may have found the inspiration for the robot design in this summer's I, Robot.

The notoriously low-budget "Rock With You" video has sparkly animation added that gives Michael flapping wings at one point. When we get to "Blame It on the Boogie" the split-screen returns and takes hold, because the effect is needlessly added to "Can You Feel It", "Beat It" and "Thriller" as well. When we get to "State of Shock", his duet with Mick Jagger, there's lots of animated magazine covers and the like, including a shot of Michael with E.T. (This is a poster that was included in a special "storybook album" Michael narrated that condensed the plot of E.T. down to forty minutes or so.)

Curiously, when we make it to the two songs from Bad, we're only shown unaltered clips from the original videos, as if the filmmakers were tired of coming up with add-ons and just said screw it.

First we get the video for "The Way You Make Me Feel", and in the Weird Performance Tics rundown, we have an extended bit of Michael and his backup dancers humping the pavement [!]. The video for "Dirty Diana" contains a lot more Michael Tics, most notably his famous "scream, twist left nipple, point at the ground" move, along with his "tear off shirt to expose gaunt rib cage" maneuver that the crowds loved so much.

Still, it's nice in this cynical age to recall that Michael, when he was at his peak, did some great songs. (IMO Bad was his last really solid album.)