Reviews

The US is diverse. New York is diverse. They're portraying that. Get over it.

Whether the show is good is another story. I don't know how many people reading this have ever watched the Disney Channel but I don't know of a better way to describe it: the jokes here give me serious Disney Channel vibes. Bad over-acting and over-exaggerated minor occurrences. Everyone is delivering their lines like they're all the punchline. It's so weird to describe so I won't try anymore. Whatever the reason, it's bad.

I get the feeling this was made by someone who was so fascinated with Ali the person and only somewhat interested in Ali the boxer. Outside of the crisp production and HD highlights, there's very little content here for either the avid boxing fan or for the casual fan wanting to learn more about The Greatest. And the problem is, the creators seem unable to distinguish and adequately portray the great moments of Ali's career.

There is a lot here on Ali's glory days. Here's the thing: Ali is a man of 2 careers. 50% of his greatness comes from how unparalleled he was at his absolute best. The other 50% comes from what he did when he should have been far past his best. I'm of course talking about his win over a prime George Foreman, to this day a widely-considered top 3 win in boxing history. The doc sets a ridiculous tone for Frazier-Foreman, which contrary to what you might come away thinking here, was actually one of the biggest moments in heavyweight history and the birth of one of the baddest men in boxing history, George Foreman. It seems silly to think that the creators of a Muhammad Ali documentary don't have a proper understanding of George Foreman's legacy. But it really comes off that way.

The visuals are pretty cool and might get better with more funding if it gets picked up for more episodes. The writing is nonsensical. If you have a burning need to feel weirded out, go read Borges's short stories.

It used to be that, because of competition of time slots, TV shows would get tested through pilot episodes. Well the streaming services seem to have invented pilot seasons. It looks like the current formula is to give your writing staff some freedom of ideas but not a lot of time to come up with them, and now we get these mediocre first seasons that are thrown out as a "let's see what sticks" strategy. How many times when you don't like a show are you told by a friend, "Oh stick it through, it doesn't get good until the third season"? This show isn't the exception to this trend. It might become something good, but as is, it's just a series of incoherent conversations with some very impressively improvised visuals.

I've been following the story of Michiacan's Autodefensas almost from the moment they began popping up in the news. This is is a bad documentary.

Good first, the footage is really amazing. It's one thing to do interviews and capture some funerals, bloody sceneries, etc. It's another to capture several firefights. Props to the crew for their courage.

That's about it. I've heard the director during an interview say something along the lines of "By the end I realized there weren't any good people in this battle". And it's completely understandable how the viewer can arrive at that conclusion just from watching the doc.

The reality is so much more complex than the director portrays and I don't know if he's simple minded or if it's done in bad faith to create a more shocking story. The rise of the autodefensas is fundamentally a story of a government that did a terrible job of defending its citizens against organized crime. In their desperation to rid their cities of cartel activity some municipalities in Michoacán gave their support to a rival cartel which displaces the original, splits in two, and after the smoke clears stations itself in these municipalities as the Caballeros Templarios cartel. They charged quotas on all exchanges and properties, controlled the markets and supply, charged kids to go to school, killed people over police reports... Cornered by their desperation and tactical misfires, civilians took up arms. Farmers, teachers, lemon pickers, doctors. People who were completely untrained in combat. Those were the autodefensas, and their sole purpose was to remove the Templarios. Some municipalities made awful choices. Others like Hipólito Mora's La Ruana are as heroic a modern day tale as you'll find. Their eventual crumbling, lapses of judgment, anger, paranoia, disorder, corruption, should not come as a surprise.

The documentary offers a very shallow skimming of this context. It promises to do a fair take of this initially, and only the filmmakers could answer why they decided to ultimately share a narrative of what they see as monstrosities committed on all sides, as if there were a moral equivalence between the cartels and the autodefensas. This is insultingly simplistic. I'll end with a shoutout to the comically misguided juxtaposition they tried to pull between the border vigilantes fighting a near nonexistent problem and the autodefensas.