It took me a while to get round to watching Bohemian Rhapsody. After all, I’d read the reviews. Our own Steve Rose said that the story “skirts dangerously close to Spinal Tap territory” – only without the laughs. AO Scott in the New York Times wrote that “the film seems engineered to be as unmemorable as possible, with the exception of the prosthetic teeth worn by Rami Malek.” And there was the film’s moralising stance on Freddie Mercury’s sexuality. As Alexis Petridis put it: “It seems to view the fact that he was gay as little short of a tragedy.”

Then the film was unleashed on an unsuspecting public – and became a smash hit. At time of writing, it has taken $844m (£645.5m, twice as much as A Star Is Born), astonishingly making it the highest grossing drama ever. My mum and dad went to see it and thought it was brilliant. A friend with usually impeccable taste also told me it was a hoot. “But isn’t it really homophobic?” I asked. “Yes,” he admitted, but even that didn’t entirely detract from his, or his boyfriend’s, viewing pleasure.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Terrible in a bombastically entertaining way ... Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody. Photograph: Twentieth Century Fox/Entertainment Pictures/Rex/Shutterstock

So did the critics – but not the Academy – get it horribly wrong? Er, no. Like the song from which it takes its name, Bohemian Rhapsody is basically terrible, but in a bombastically entertaining way. One element deserves unequivocal praise – Rami Malek, who as Mercury manages to act his leotard off through the most outlandish fake choppers since Christopher Lee played Dracula (“I have four extra incisors,” he informs Queen, after they’ve hooted “Not with those teeth!” at his request to join them as their singer). The final section, which restages Queen’s 15-minute spot at Live Aid, sees Malek lip synching for his life. Drag queens worldwide should be doffing their wigs in tribute.

The other high spots are trickier to pinpoint. Queen’s songs – whatever you think of them – sound as good as they ever will roaring out of cinema speakers. Mercury’s manager Paul Prenter, played by Allen Leech, may be depicted as the villain who lured Mercury into gay debauchery (like he needed luring), but I would have killed for his collection of leather jackets. The moustaches are uniformly magnificent, while the shot of Freddie strutting past his beloved cats to fling open the curtains on the morning of Live Aid is the film at its best: showy, camp and knowingly ridiculous. Bohemian Rhapsody also achieves genuine pathos in the scene where Mercury tells the rest of Queen that he has Aids. His refusal to allow others to feel sorry for him and his plucky insistence that the show must go on seem to get to the heart of his character.

The things that are bad about this film – from sloppy editing to the hectic sequence in which Mercury comes out to his parents, finds true love and plays Live Aid – have been extensively documented. (It also goes without saying that the allegations of sexual misconduct against Bryan Singer, who was fired during production of the film but directed the bulk of it, also cast a shadow.) If Bohemian Rhapsody wins best picture, film critics will be eating their leather muir caps from Hollywood to Hanoi. Despite its flaws, it delivers moments of shameless, air-punching joy. I’m not sure the same can be said about Roma.