Tyson

What emerges is a fallen warrior's tale: the inside story of a man bloodied and bowed.

Mr. Toback's film, partly because it restricts itself to Mr. Tyson's point of view, offers a rare and vivid study in the complexity of a single suffering, raging soul. It is not an entirely trustworthy movie, but it does feel profoundly honest.

An extraordinary documentary.

What's so affecting about him in the film, though, is that he doesn't seem monstrous at all. To the contrary, Iron Mike, having meted out epic suffering in the ring and other venues, seems to be a man who has suffered genuinely, even terribly, in the course of a life that he never believed would last 40 years.

It's brutal to watch the bigger-they-are-the-harder-they-fall tragedy of this once-great heavyweight. In fact, it's enough to make you cry.

The movie makes it clear that, for all his snarls and outbursts, he is intelligent, candid, and easily wounded; that he is by turns inordinately proud and inordinately ashamed and, above all, intensely curious about himself, as if his own nature were a mystery that had not yet been solved.

It's a movie that's thought-provoking without being intelligent and candid without being truthful. The same aesthetic choices that Toback seems convinced will set his documentary apart are also what diminishes its credibility.

It was an interesting movie and it did a good job giving us insight on one of the greatest boxers of all time. Tyson is definently worth watching if you are a fan of Mike Tyson or boxing in general.

A well made documentary about one of the most misunderstood sports figure in history.

I stepped into Tyson with a pretty firm idea of who the subject was, where he came from, and what I thought about his legacy. Ultimately, I'd hoped that this kind of long-session chat in a comfortable place with the former champion would reveal some special insight into his complex personal identity and deliberately checked my preconceptions at the door. Turns out I really shouldn't have bothered. Despite his best intentions to prove otherwise, Iron Mike comes across as a simple man who desperately wants to be deep but is either unwilling or unable to hide the truth. At the core of his being, he's pure reflex, which is a trait that served him well during his days in the ring but left him ripe for coercion outside its boundaries. Phenomenal athletes rarely double as tangible role models, and Tyson himself stands as dramatic proof. Little more than an ego stroke, the documentary focuses almost exclusively on the ex-champ's perspective and skims over or accepts thin excuses for each of the more intriguing moments of his life. To my eyes, the most surprising thing about this whole endeavor came from Mike's old training footage, and the realization of just how blindingly fast he really was at his physical peak.