Mr. McMahon Review

Netflix and their shakedown of modern documentary filmmaking has tarnished how audiences receive information on topics of intense interest. There is no doubt they have a grand scope for what gets people talking, the inevitable circulation of water cooler moments in their limited series has been a staple of the streaming platform for nearly a decade, but it is now, more than ever, feeling the burden of oversaturation. Mr. McMahon, the six-episode documentary slated as a deep dive into the scandals, successes and allegations circling Vince McMahon, is nothing more than the everyday, passive documentarian style that Netflix has moulded for ease of access and repeatability. A shallow dive into a vast pool, we are pulled all too quickly from the meatier, intense moments of history and left in the dark on other details even casual wrestling fans will notice have been left out. 

Mr. McMahon suffers from the burden of its eponymous figure. A chance to dive into the history of a sports entertainer and an effective, financially successful one. He sees no similarity in picking the national units of wrestlers apart from that of Ted Turner’s head-hunting of WWE talent for WCW. That is about the only part of interest in this whole piece. The rest is filler, fluff and a suggestion of building up to the allegations revealed just before the documentary wrapped its interview process. But instead of making space for it, cliffhangers regarding the death of Chris Benoit or legal action against McMahon in the steroids scandal are made, and it all crumbles under the weight of trying to pull intensity out of a series of stories and historied encounters Jim Cornette has talked to death. The Montreal Screwjob is the main focus of one episode and used as a crutch for the next. 

A static narrative soon comes through, omitting more than the 2K Games which used to feature these past match-ups. Those were somewhat better than Mr. McMahon, a documentary puzzled on whether to dive into his upbringing or focus on what makes him the man he is today. Either way, director Chris Smith has fallen for the character which delighted and disgusted millions of audiences. It is never clear where the character stops and the man starts, and Smith should do far better than he does here to separate the two. This failure is massive and impacts the documentary in a way it cannot recover from. It turns genuinely fascinating moments in the history of the company, and its talent, into little vox pop, talking head comments from those who too fell for the McMahon character. 

From Dwayne Johnson delivering flat, catchphrase-like assessments of massive situations to the science-denying Steve Austin statements regarding the Benoit head injuries, all of this does well to highlight a plague of indifference and ignorance in and out of the ring. Make of McMahon what you will, the documentary is certainly confused enough to not guide you on that. What becomes clear is McMahon is a vicious businessman and the excuse of it being for the company, and not a personal vendetta, is trotted out as a withering replacement of genuine information. Bret Hart is likely the only talking head featurette worth watching. Perhaps Shawn Michaels regretted some of the earlier components of the Attitude Era, too. But all of this is hindsight and with it, Smith misses the sole point of a documentary recorded at the start of a billionaire’s downfall.