Tyson

If there is anyone out there in the world who still idolizes Mike Tyson with a feverish adoration, then they can now rejoice and celebrate the arrival of James Toback's documentary Tyson, which operates as a veritable love letter to the infamous boxing legend. But for those of us who have had enough of Tyson's warped machismo and hateful remarks, this is a movie of little worth.

Toback heaps praise upon his subject as Tyson rambles on in seemingly endless interview footage. He apologizes and philosophizes his way through the movie and occasionally chokes up when talking about his troubled childhood or late mentor. He reminisces about past mistakes and offers up anecdotes about dabbling in criminal activity as a kid and preparing for fights as an adult.

He talks about nearly every aspect of his iconic image, be it the big fights and past loves or the grimier fare like his rape conviction and ear-biting incident. The Tyson on display in this movie is a more calm and collected version than the one we have seen before, but the foul-mouthed machine of the past sporadically shines through when talking about Desiree Washington (the woman who accused him of rape) or promoter Don King (who Tyson eventually sued for fraud).

Throughout Tyson's entire verbal exorcism, Toback splices in archival footage of past fights and strange media interviews that helped define Tyson's public persona. Seeing the big fights that made Tyson one of the great heavyweight champions of all time is an acceptable way to give the man's career some context amidst his meandering present day comments. But the problem is that Toback just scatters the footage in reckless fashion, killing any hope of a coherent narrative thread.

The interview footage with Tyson is entirely disorganized, as the man leaps from subject to subject at will and with little purpose. Some people may like the narrative chaos at work here, but I found it to be messy and unnecessarily tedious. No one expects Tyson to be a perfectly articulate gentleman in front of the camera (nor should they), but the slapdash editing causes the movie to unfold in every direction while still maintaining the sense of going nowhere.

However, Toback's lazy approach to documentary filmmaking is arguably more satisfying than his lone attempt at artsy execution. At several points throughout the movie, Toback and editor Aaron Yanes employ a split-screen tile effect in which the footage is cut up into little pieces and placed strategically to form the look of a blocky puzzle. To add to the considerable distraction, hokey "wipe" effects are used to transition between the various tiled arrangements. This effect is used so often that it is as though Toback and Yanes only recently discovered that you can place multiple images in the frame.

Toback even takes this effect one step further by overlapping the audio tracks from the different footage so that Tyson's thoughts and ideas smash together in an aurally asinine mess. The clashing of audio represents a weak and uninspired decision that transparently attempts to show the many sides of Mike Tyson and the war of words banging around in his head. Instead of further exploring the complexities of the movie's subject, the overlapping audio is really just a lot of noise.

Mike Tyson the man and the legend is an intriguing and unforgettable figure in the history of sports icons. But while the veins of his torrid past flow with bad blood, giving way to contemporary, reminiscent regret, Tyson himself is not sufficiently magnetic to carry the weight of a 90-minute documentary. To hear him shoulder the blame for past mistakes and occasionally show a softer side is mildly interesting, but it's difficult to shed a tear for a man who defined himself as a sexist, hateful maniac at the peak of his career.

James Toback has a clear sense of the portrait he wants to paint of Mike Tyson. He ensures that the onscreen version of modern Tyson is a man filled with pain and sadness and hope for the future. But when Tyson's supposedly heartfelt ramblings are accompanied by factory-processed footage of the aging fighter standing on the beach and staring longingly at the rolling waves, there is a sense that the movie is strangely manufactured. Tyson the movie acts like a dramatic exposé, but it comes across as a dishonest portrait occupying an emotional dead zone. Instead of making sense of Tyson the man, it simply adds another weird chapter to the life of Tyson the legend.