The Amy Winehouse Biopic No One Wants Is Trashing Her Legacy

It’s woefully ironic that the first clip from the upcoming Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black is of star Marisa Abela covering Winehouse’s “Stronger Than Me,” since that’s exactly what you have to be to watch the clip enough times to deduce what song Abela is mumble-scatting. As many times as I’ve heard “Stronger Than Me”—a single off Winehouse’s 2003 debut album, Frank—it took me several tries to determine just what in the sexy baby hell was going on in this video. Sure, the song is mangled and autotuned into a monster of its original form that sounds just half a note off from the original at all times. But it’s not just Abela’s abhorrent cover that besmirches Winehouse’s legacy; it’s also the content of the clip itself, which speeds through time and barely gives us a sense of Winehouse’s character.

Granted, this is just one clip from an entire film, which isn’t hitting cinemas in the U.K. until April 12 and won’t hop across the pond to theaters in the U.S. until May 17. But seeing the clip in the context of the rest of the movie isn’t necessary, at least not in this case. With two trailers and this one official vignette, snipped out of the movie and thrown up on TikTok and YouTube (where the comments were promptly turned off), Back to Black has failed to make any collective impression that isn’t steeped in vitriol.

There was no chance that audiences were ever going to take kindly to an Amy Winehouse biopic, given that the singer has only been met with even greater reverence since her untimely passing in 2011, at the age of 27. But for director Sam Taylor-Johnson to make a film that looks this shoddy is another thing entirely. With the reasonably substantial amount of evidence we’ve been provided, it’s safe to say that Back to Black is shaping up to be a colossal misfire, the likes of which we haven’t seen for quite some time. This won’t just be a bad biopic—it will be another attempt to stain the legacy and leech cash out of someone who fended off bloodsuckers for her entire career.

Read more at The Daily Beast.