‘I don’t really regret anything in my life…’
I think every man has a wrestling phase at some point in his boneheaded life. For me, the Attitude Era of young upstarts Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock battling it out with veterans such as The Undertaker and Shawn Michaels coincided with my own short lived and mostly pathetic teenage rebellion. For a couple of years there, however, (roughly incorporating Wrestlemania 14 and 15) I loved WWF as much as music, films and football. What I wasn’t doing at this point in my life unsurprisingly was talking to any girls. Not to worry. Mr. McMahon attempts to pull back the curtain on the figure at the head of WWF (since renamed as the WWE) for forty years – Vince McMahon himself…
Noted documentarian Chris Smith (Tiger King, American Movie) began this series on McMahon before the various allegations of sexual abuse began to surface. The result is an uneasy marriage of before and after. Puff piece and hatchet job. This dichotomy, however, only makes Mr. McMahon more compelling.
Smith whittled down over 200 hours of footage for this six-part deep dive into Vince McMahon with many major wrestling celebrities taking part. Aside from all the aforementioned from the Attitude Era, we also hear from Hulk Hogan, Bret Hart and many others, with the latter providing a fresh insight into the infamous Montreal Screwjob (if you don’t know what that is then this probably isn’t the documentary for you). Smith builds a picture of McMahon over six episodes but wisely avoids attaching judgment. Occasionally, he might edit a sequence of scenes in such a way that exposes McMahon as a liar or a hypocrite but I never got the sense of an overriding agenda at play here. Instead, Smith examines all sides of McMahon’s truly disparate personality with high praise coming from figures such as ‘Taker and Shawn Michaels and damning criticism from Hart and various journalists who have written hit pieces about McMahon over the years. Perhaps most prescient are the interviews with Vince’s son Shane, who not only seems like a thoroughly decent chap (and the only sane member of the McMahon family) but also comes across as eloquent and thoughtful.
Mr. McMahon perhaps doesn’t offer anything new for devotees of professional wrestling, but it is probably the first time all of this stuff has been presented together. Like WWF itself (I can’t bring myself to call it WWE), Mr. McMahon is big, loud and always entertaining. And that’s the bottom line…
