Mike Review: Hulu’s Tyson Biopic Lands With a Thud

Sam Rosenberg
·8 min read
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The post Mike Review: Hulu’s Tyson Biopic Lands With a Thud appeared first on Consequence.

The Pitch: Violence has shaped much of Mike Tyson (Trevante Rhodes)’s life. Growing up in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, Tyson dealt with brutal beatings from bullies as often as he received and witnessed verbal and physical lashings at home. Fighting back seemed to be the easiest solution to the hate and hurt he faced, and the bloodier and harder his blows against his peers got, the stronger his determination to make a name for himself became.

After a few stints in juvenile detention, a teenage Tyson got the chance to take his street brawling to the ring with the guidance of renowned boxing trainer Cus D’Amato (Harvey Keitel). Tyson’s prolific wins early in his burgeoning career earned him fame and wealth, launching the wunderkind from downtrodden obscurity into the bright and shiny American cultural spotlight. D’Amato even went as far as to act as a surrogate parent to the fatherless Tyson, a meaningful gesture were it not for D’Amato’s irony-free insistence that he’d help turn Tyson into “a beast” and “a monster.”

As Tyson continued to embrace his celebrity lifestyle, a turbulent marriage to TV star Robin Givens (Laura Harrier) and a credible rape allegation from beauty pageant queen Desiree Washington (Li Eubanks) quickly upended his momentum. Boxing promoter Don King (Russell Hornsby) stepped in to support Tyson in averting these crises, but his own opportunistic agenda created even more financial and personal issues for the prizefighting champion.

Told across eight chapters in the Hulu miniseries Mike, Tyson’s journey is a tragic, all-too-familiar portrait of unresolved trauma, the painful pressures of fame, and how the intersection of the two reinforce an unrelenting cycle of self-destruction and hubris.

An Automatic KO: Collaborating for the second time with I, Tonya screenwriter Steven Rogers, filmmaker Craig Gillespie’s newest directorial undertaking, Mike, adapts the life of infamous boxer Mike Tyson, spanning from his upbringing in the mid-70s to the late 2010s. The result is a thin and haphazard drama that does a disservice to the talent of its well-cast lead, and flattens the nuances behind Tyson’s complex background and tumultuous history.

Like with Gillespie’s other unauthorized dramatization Pam & Tommy, Mike stirred controversy from Tyson himself, who lambasted Hulu for “stealing my story” and confirmed plans to produce a show of his own with Jamie Foxx playing him. Even without Tyson’s creative involvement, Mike barely makes a dent.

Right from the start, the limited series seems totally uninterested in interrogating the inner lives of its characters, instead constantly repeating information about them via voiceover as if worried the audience’s attention will wane and speeding through exposition like it’s in a rush to get to the next part. Along with its obnoxious fourth-wall breaking and a shoddy structure that hopscotches around time and place with careless abandon, Mike handpicks tropes from every celebrity biopic of the past decade and blends them into episodic mush.

Mike Review Hulu Tyson Biopic
Mike Review Hulu Tyson Biopic

Mike (Hulu)

Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing: Despite Tyson’s criticisms, it’s still possible to take artistic liberties and produce a thematically rich tale out of how race, class, and gender affected his status as a young Black male athlete in America. Take, for example, Michael Mann’s commanding depiction of boxing legend Muhammad Ali during the social upheaval of the ‘60s in 2001’s Ali. Or Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski’s compelling 2016 miniseries The People vs. O.J. Simpson, which effectively captured the multifaceted cultural scope of football star O.J. Simpson’s 1994 trial.

With Mike, however, Gillespie and Rogers simply apply the same method they used for I, Tonya, reconciling Tyson’s contradictions as both an abuser with material power and a victim of circumstance to sensationalist, slapdash effect.

The first crucial mistake Mike makes is having each episode feature cutaways of an adult Tyson recalling details from his difficult childhood and relationships to an auditorium filled with nameless, faceless spectators. This blunt framing device — of Tyson addressing an anonymous audience, speaking directly to the camera, and gesturing at the slideshow of photos behind him — technically riffs on Undisputed Truth, Tyson’s one-man show from 2013, but ultimately stands as a lazy and overbearing attempt to immerse us in his struggles with the limelight.

Such a heavy-handed style might sort of be the point, an aptly abrasive way of emulating the thrust of Tyson’s experiences. But without letting the images speak for themselves, Mike constantly undermines itself with self-reflexive commentary, not letting its most pivotal beats a chance to breathe without some sort of meta interjection.

From the excessive narration and the slo-mo imagery to the exhausting camerawork and the on-the-nose soundtrack, Gillespie’s elaborate Scorsese cosplay is about as off-putting and clumsy as the writing’s forced levity and allergy to subtext.

Almost every single dramatic moment is spelled out, to the point where you could anticipate from a mile away any given scene you’d expect to see from a work of this genre. Insert a raunchy montage of Tyson’s sexual exploits here, throw in a scene of Tyson getting taken advantage of by King or D’Amato there, add in a moment where a close family member tells Tyson that he’s being mistreated, and voila, you have your biopic!

Raging Dull: Aside from the in-your-face technical flair and cookie-cutter template, what’s most frustrating about Mike is that it has found the perfect person to play its protagonist and somehow even fumbles that. Trevante Rhodes, uncanny as Tyson, deserves much better material than what he’s given.

The Moonlight star certainly has the boxer’s hunky physicality, signature lisp, and toothy grin down, but the script presents him and the actors who play the younger versions of Tyson (Ethan Barrett and B.J. Minor) with such stale, awkwardly written dialogue. Consequently, Rhodes’s performance amounts to a serviceable impression of Tyson rather than a fully lived-in characterization.

Russell Hornsby, another brilliant and underutilized performer, manages to inject some energy into Mike as Don King. The Fences actor is similarly burdened with bad writing, but he convincingly and enthusiastically hones in on King’s manipulative charisma in his brief screen time.

The rest of the cast, however, feels like they’re on autopilot, inhabiting mechanically outlined roles that both undercut the individual strengths of the actors and downplay the importance of their characters’ relationships to Tyson.

Keitel can do the tough-loving mentor shtick in his sleep, while Harrier is limited in what she can accomplish as Givens. Her part is reduced to a deceitful housewife who overmedicated Tyson and her resilience against his cruelty — and the very public shaming she received for coming forward about it — is frustratingly never fully explored.

There’s an interesting thematic thread here — the conflation of love and care with fear and codependency — that Mike sets up well and then wrestles with finding any new or unique insights from it.

It makes sense that Tyson would fill up the lack of emotional fulfillment in his life with hedonistic pleasures and intense bursts of rage, but how is that different from any other celebrity catapulted from one toxic environment into another? What is Mike saying about the complex interplay between capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and the never-ending cultural enablement of bad behavior that hasn’t been said already and better?

Mike Review Hulu Tyson Biopic
Mike Review Hulu Tyson Biopic

Mike (Hulu)

The closest the limited series gets to cutting through the middle-of-the-road noise is in its fifth episode “Desiree,” one of the few installments not penned by Rogers or directed by Gillespie. Director Tiffany Johnson, showrunner Karin Gist, and writer Samantha Corbin-Miller shift away from Tyson’s perspective and admirably center Washington’s experience as a rape survivor, even if the aims to honor her humanity outside of her trauma are a bit perfunctory.

Perplexing, though, that, as stated in the episode’s credits, the real-life Washington has continued to stay out of the spotlight since the 1992 case, making one wonder if granting agency to her side of the story, while well-intended, might also be going against Washington’s desire to avoid more attention and scrutiny.

The Verdict: This vague undercurrent of hypocrisy runs throughout Mike’s portrayal of exploitation. Controlling men like Cus D’Amato and Don King believed they were doing the right thing in capitalizing on Tyson’s success and managing his image. In essence, Mike the miniseries is arguably doing the same thing to the real-life Tyson, packaging his life as a spectacle and assuming authority over his story without his permission.

It’s not uncommon for TV shows or movies to do such a thing, but Mike does it in such a muddled manner, seemingly more focused on checking off a list of Tyson’s achievements and controversies in how they fit into the current zeitgeist rather than cultivating its thematic seeds into a more potent and incisive character study.

Beyond the hollow, uninspired treatment of its subject matter, Mike has the rhythm of a Wikipedia article cut up into little pieces and spliced hastily back together, so schematic and threadbare and depthless that it makes a strong argument to end the conventional Hollywood biopic for good, until someone can figure out how to rewrite and ultimately transcend the formula.

Where to Watch: Mike premieres Thursday, August 25th, with two episodes debuting each week through September 15th.

Trailer: 

Mike Review: Hulu’s Tyson Biopic Lands With a Thud
Sam Rosenberg

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