What is there to say about a documentary that has a convicted rapist calling his victim "a wretched swine of a woman," one that offers the bells from Rocky's Going the Distance as improbably noble background music to its subject's life?
A cleverly-sanitized portrait of a thug, craftily cobbled together by perhaps his biggest admirer on the planet, Tyson is the selective life of ex-heavyweight champion Mike Tyson in his own mangled words.
Director James Toback -- himself a sometime misunderstood victim of the media (Spy magazine used to track his alleged ham-handed pick-up attempts) -- razzle dazzles this talking-head movie, splitting the screen four ways as Tyson talks, over-sampling and repeating lines for effect. Sometimes it enhances Tyson's unrepetent reminiscences, sometimes it serves to distract.
It's good filmmaking with no pretense of balance. These days some people are okay with that in a documentary.
Even if it is from the horse's mouth, there are but a few real revelations in this doc. Among them: Tyson once beat the hell out of Don King (perhaps his only noble act), he had gonorrhea the night he won the championship from Canadian Trevor Berbick, and -- most remarkably -- he remembers "performing fellatio" on a young woman in a club, the first time he managed to pick up the most beautiful woman in the room on the basis of his newfound fame.
The rest is hoary Tyson lore, retold in the tired fighter's now-huskier voice: How he committed gang robberies at age 12 in Brooklyn, was rescued post-juvenile detention by the crafty old ring master Cus D'Amato, how Cus fashioned him into a fighter designed to win the world championship on sheer brute force, and how Tyson's life went off the rails after D'Amato's death.
It's a simple fairytale that, like most things in the fighter's self-told life, offers up an excuse, an outside event, an evil "other," anything but responsibility or apology for the self-inflicted circus that was his career.
No apology to Evander Holyfield for biting off his ear (it was Holyfield's head-butting that brought it on). And forget Desiree Washington, the beauty queen whose rape accusation saw him do three years in jail.
"I may have took advantage of women before, but I never took advantage of her," he says. Oh, before! That's different then.
The one surprise -- he gets remarkably tender talking about his first wife Robin Givens ("We were just kids"), though watching the famous Barbara Walters video where she talked about him hitting her, he now says "I should have said something."
It could be described as hubris, except Tyson never displayed pride. Yes, he was the dominant fighter of his era, but when things got tough, he folded.
He never had an all-heart last act. The only evidence that he has a heart is that Toback gets his Barbara Walters moment out of Tyson at long last. He cries.
But then, crocodiles cry too.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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