Following his previous documentary on model Jordan, director Richard Macer returns to film her when she is nearing the birth of her son, Harvey, with footballer Dwight York. The film follows her for over a year during which she gives birth, has her son diagnosed blind, is treated for cancer, publicly splits from Dwight, meets a boyfriend, Matt at a car show and picks her modelling career back up.
Never one to miss a chance to get on the back of a bit of publicity, the BBC rescreened this documentary from 2002 whenever Jordan launched herself back onto the front pages on the tabloids with her turn in the jungle on `reality' tv show `I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here'. However that is not that bad a thing because the first documentary in this trilogy was actually pretty good and did a good job of going beyond the public personae of Jordan to find the real person. For much of this film it continues to do the same thing, but to lesser effect. Maybe it is because so many `facts' of Kate's life are very public knowledge, but this film struggles to really tell us anything - in fact many of the onscreen `revelations' were old news even when this was screened the first.
Instead of just reporting `the baby is blind' or `she has cancer' this film needed to really probe deeper, in the way that Theroux does when he does one of his films, but it doesn't. In fact Macer seems to quite like Jordan and doesn't like to probe too deeply; which is a big problem for a documentary maker. He passes judgement and makes comments, but these all come in the editing studio as a narration. Too often he is forced to ask questions; `I couldn't tell if Kate was being really strong or if she was in denial', well sorry, but why didn't you try to do more to find out more during the years you spent with her? I don't want to be cruel because I hope that the third documentary in the series will fair better than this one, but this is pretty weak.
That's not to say it is unwatchable for it is still interesting as a behind the scenes look but it doesn't do enough. I enjoyed the first film because it took the model Jordan and revealed the real person Katie Price behind all the tabloid headlines. However, this film doesn't take it any further than that where I really wanted it to be more revealing than `I'm a Celebrity' but it wasn't. As a film it was watchable but as a documentary it was flawed. This was a surprise to me; when you think that so much happens to Katie that would be hard to deal with (the press, the baby being blind, cancer etc) that the film should have been deeper and more emotionally involving. Instead it is lazy and uninvolving - even the soundtrack is lazy, using r'n'b records most of the time and then more sentimental music when the tone requires it.
Overall this is a reasonable film if you are interested in Jordan. However if you are interested Katie Price then you will likely to be disappointed. The film doesn't get any closer to the real person's feelings than the tabloids do, Macer captures the turbulent surface to Katie but really needed to get past that and get further than her surface feelings. The tabloids can do that, with the sheer amount of access he had, Macer could have done better, and should've.