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The story is cloudy but there's a lot of bad living around it. But he was going downhill outside the ring. All this in four years, from youngest champion and role model rivaling Muhammad Ali to a battered and exploited loser. Then he lost the title to underdog James "Buster" Douglas. He had a spectacular fight against Leon Spinks, a highly touted fighter, scoring a wining KO in the first 90 seconds. He's a lot less rich now but he's not broke either he says he never cared much about the money. Tyson did relatively very well financially, made millions and kept a lot of them, for a while anyway. At this point big-time black manager Don King entered Mike's life (his managers and trainers had all been white), and at first again King was helpful, but then began to manipulate and cheat, and soon he was in worse hands with King than he was with Givens.
#Tyson film 2008 tv
He married TV actress Robin Givens, who at first helped him with finances and housekeeping, but violent fights and public humiliation led to divorce, with Givens at first seen as the wrongdoer. Tyson's mentor Cus D'Amato died and his world lost its center even before he had quite won the heavyweight title, though he was well on his way, and, at nineteen, the youngest ever to do so. You don't have to be sympathetic to Mike Tyson to see that this is a tragic story. What is his secret? That, the film leaves us to figure out for ourselves, if we can. But he's not the only boxer to have those qualities. He's big, strong, fast, confident, in great shape. But for boxing ignoramus like myself, scrutinize as I may the many early fights in which Tyson stages a knockdown right away and wins the fight, I can't see how he does it. Partly his monologue is a confession and one of his first revelations is that he has always been very afraid. Perhaps the sheer ferocity of a terrified animal. It's a mystery to me what made Tyson such an incredible fighter when he was young. This is a man who went very wrong, but not a stupid man. He had no kind of formal schooling, but when he talks, his vocabulary is ornamented with relatively sophisticated words, even if the syntax is a bit rough.
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He was sent to a reformatory at the age of twelve. He came from the worst kind of background, with hardly any parenting, growing up in a very bad part of Brooklyn in the early Seventies when New York was in terrible shape, a robber and a drug dealer. A Maori warrior facial half-tattoo enhances this complexity. Mike Tyson has the monumental sculptured features of some giant Pacific atoll tiki figure and he also looks like a thug. On both sides, Toback's and Tyson's, this is an exercise in trust. But because he himself must admit that many of his actions are indefensible, you get a balanced picture. This is as close as you could get to seeing the world from Mike Tyson's point of view. Toback provides plenty of historical footage of the fighter's turbulent career, but none of that would mean much if Tyson hadn't opened up to Toback's camera the way he did, looking squarely into the lens and telling his story as he remembers and feels it (and the visuals of Tyson talking are elegantly filmed). Tyson is such a documentary not just because Mike Tyson is a complex man, but because the filmmaker James Toback is his friend and becomes his collaborator. To make a great documentary you must find a fascinating subject and follow it wherever it takes you.
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Reviewed by Chris Knipp 9 /10 Deep rapport