The rise and fall of Iron Mike in his own words: Brooklyn, Cus D’Amato, the heavyweight belt at twenty, Robin Givens, Buster Douglas, Desiree Washington (“that wretched swine of a woman”) and the three-year prison term for rape, the tattoos of Che and Mao, the Muslims, Don King (“a wretched slimy reptilian motherfucker”), Evander Holyfield and his bitten ear, etc. Director James Toback, who had known Tyson for over twenty years and had used him previously in Black and White, gets him to talk and talk, a virtual monologue with no audible questions, amounting to a talking-head movie tricked up with split screens and switched camera angles (a clumsy stab at multifacetedness) and of course archive footage and photos. A supplement to, rather than a replacement for, Barbara Kopple’s Fallen Champ (which went only as far as the imprisonment, already a ways into mid-fall), it has plenty of psychological if not cinematic interest, never more so than when the lisping warrior’s throat closes up and throttles his words, and it could well win some unforeseen compassion for him, even if we still wouldn’t want to remove the barrier of the movie screen. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.