aka Charlie Sheen

If you have any curiosity at all about Charlie Sheen, you’ll consume AKA Charlie Sheen in one three-hour gulp like we did. Sheen’s forthrightness and brutal honesty as he reflects back on his eventful life so far is just that fascinating to watch.

aka Charlie Sheen is an exercise in damage control that revels in the destruction, only pulling back right at the edge of excess. It is – as Sheen himself would put it – a winning formula.

It must be exhausting to be Charlie Sheen. Just watching the two-part Netflix documentary series “AKA Charlie Sheen” can feel draining. .... To Sheen’s credit, he is forthcoming and places the blame for his troubles squarely on himself.

Odd, frustrating, occasionally intriguing project, which pads out scarce but real nuggets of insight with leading questions and endless clips.

Like the sweep of Sheen’s life in micro, aka Charlie Sheen goes from fascinating to numbing, numbing to fascinating, sensational to desensitizing, and not always pleasantly.

There is too little self-examination on Sheen’s part here – and too many wistfully happy smiles as he remembers his partying days – for us to feel any sorrier for him than we do for those around him.

You can't help but like Charlie Sheen despite his self-destructive behavior. It's hard to even have any pity because he leans into his addictions and flaws. As per usual, I enjoy the beginnings of biographies like this, but they always fizzle by the end. Case in point, this one. It appears they tried to make him as bad as possible, and he was pretty bad, but then try to save him in the end, which felt super contrived. It made the doc seem like Sheen had too much control over it.

It's interesting enough so far. But I can't help but wonder how much of it is staged fluff. How much of it actually happened. How much is Sheen sensationalising to give a good story and get back in the public eye. I don't think we'll ever know and I think that takes away from it in a negative way.