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Written by Pete TImmermann Friday, 12 June 2009 02:35

What's next, a documentary in which O.J. Simpson is once again made out to be a hero?

Mike Tyson has been experiencing a bit of a comeback in the media lately. There's his cameo in The Hangover, his old video game series, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, just had its first new entry in the series in over a decade (although the series no longer bears his name), and now there's a documentary by James Toback, Tyson, in which he is given free reign to tell his version of the story, with little to no contradicting evidence put forth by the filmmakers. The question is, though, after being convicted of rape and generally acting like a complete psychopath at every turn, does Tyson really deserve a comeback?

Personally, I could give a shit about Mike Tyson, or boxing, for that matter, but I like James Toback (who has worked with Tyson previously, in the 1999 fiction film Black & White), so I figured I'd give Tyson a shot. I was thoroughly entertained throughout, which is saying something given my disinterest in the subject, but that doesn't really change my opinion of Tyson's worthiness of such a tribute, and makes me feel kind of uneasy about the film as a whole. The gray area from which the film operates is Mike Tyson's own mind; he's put forth as being an American hero and the best boxer to have ever lived, but the abhorrent things from his past—the rape of Desiree Washington, the biting of the ear of Evander Holyfield, the YouTube clips of him saying stupid shit (responding to a heckler: "I'll fuck you 'til you love me, faggot!")—are all given easy answers. I don't mean to spoil the surprise, but he contends that he is innocent of the rape (which, to my knowledge, is a contention on which he has never faltered), that he bit off a chunk of Holyfield's ear because Holyfield kept head butting him (which may be true, but is that a reasonable response?), and that he is overly defensive in his run-ins with people because he was a bullied little kid, and he's scared.

To Tyson's credit, his cameo in The Hangover is funny because of him; he could have blown it, but he really winds up selling the scene. The same goes for Tyson itself; Toback pretty much just hands Mike the reigns, which he handles pretty deftly. Although he has an unintentionally funny way of misusing or mispronouncing words—at one point he says that he performed fellatio on a lady friend; Mike, either that wasn't fellatio or that wasn't a lady—on the whole he comes off as being pretty smart and interesting and capable of telling a good story. There's a particularly strong clip of a young Tyson explaining his ability to steal a wallet from a stranger who's expecting him to steal the wallet, which comes up later as a variation on how he would intimidate his boxing opponents.

None of these things do anything to assuage my main concern, though. What's next, a documentary in which O.J. Simpson is once again made out to be a hero, blithely assuming he's innocent of everything he's ever been charged with? How much different is that from what we're dealing with here? Not very, I'm afraid. | Pete Timmermann