Before I begin this post, I should say that I'm not a big fan of James Toback at all. I find his films dim-witted and silly and rather misogynistic overall. But when I heard that he had made a documentary about Mike Tyson, I was interested....
The form of the film is a bit annoying to begin with as it's only Tyson talking about himself - and he's neither a smart man, nor an analytical man. Then Toback does all this crap with cutting multiple takes of Tyson talking and putting them in little squares on the screen - giving a sort of scattered and multi-faceted feeling to what he's saying (which is all style and no substance). There are also inter-cut sequences with Tyson walking on the beach reading poetry - including Oscar Wilde... it's almost laughable and reminiscent of Jack Handy's brilliant 'Deep Thoughts'. Ugh!
Tyson is totally unapologetic and generally child-like and not mature at all. He basically says he had a hard life growing up and then worked hard to become a champion and then fucked up his life from that point. I guess Toback does show how much of an animal the fighter is - with brawling and generally behaving like a pig at different points. He basically gets off scott-free with his life-long abuse of women - and strangely calls Desiree Washington, the Miss Black America contestant he was convicted of raping, a 'whore bitch' or something to that effect... this is unhelpful and disturbing.
Mike Tyson is not a philosopher king, nor does he have almost anything interesting to say about his (possibly interesting) life. Add to this some rather big sloppy editing and montage mistakes by Toback (like shots of Tyson with the face tattoo shown during voice over that has him talking about partying in the 1990s and non-chronological fight clips, or non-original source footage) and you get a pretty lousy movie.
Stars: .5 of 4
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