Craig Gillespie turns tawdry, tabloid-ready tales into prestige dramas, and Mike is of a glib piece with his prior I, Tonya and Pam & Tommy. Recounting the highs and lows of former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson (Trevante Rhodes) with a wink and a smirk, the director and executive producer’s eight-part Hulu series—created by Steven Rogers and overseen by Karen Gist—is a flashy biopic awash in the filmmaker’s usual showmanship tics. It’s yet another case of style over substance, or at least it is until its fifth episode, when it focuses on the one human about whom it has a clear point of view: Desiree Washington (Li Eubanks), the Miss Black America contestant whom Tyson was convicted of raping in 1992, thus earning him a six-year prison sentence (he served less than three).
“No one’s just one thing. We’re all a bunch of things,” states Tyson during a performance of the one-man Las Vegas stage show that forms the structural skeleton of Mike (Aug. 25), allowing its protagonist to guide us through his ups and downs as well as to serve as narrator for the dramatic recreations to come. Tyson’s sentiment is meant to suggest that he’s a mass of contradictions who, on the one hand, is a sensitive and subtly smart guy who suffered at the hands of many, and who on the other hand is a rampaging brute with indefensibly vicious instincts. That may be true, yet in its first five installments, Hulu’s venture paints a portrait that’s less complicated than scattershot and superficial, revisiting Tyson’s rough upbringing and dully illustrating how it molded him into the ferocious fighter and off-the-rails individual he eventually became.
Though it opens with one of Tyson’s most notorious moments—chomping on Evander Holyfield’s ear in the ring on June 28, 1997—Mike quickly leaps backwards to his childhood while simultaneously having future Tyson (now boasting his tribal face tattoo) regale an auditorium of paying customers with his life story. Young Tyson is a pudgy kid from Brownsville, New York, who’s relentlessly bullied and finds his calling when a tormentor kills one of his beloved pet pigeons, thereby igniting a rage that initially drives him to an adolescent career of breaking-and-entering delinquency and arrests. At one juvenile detention center, the 13-year-old Tyson (B.J. Minor) falls in love with boxing and is sent to train with the legendary Cus D’Amato (Harvey Keitel), who tells him to “embrace his villainy” and becomes the father figure he never had—much to the disgust of his hard-knocks mother (Olunike Adeliyi), whom the series, as is its wont, vaguely depicts as both a tough abuse victim and nasty disciplinarian.
Gillespie and his fellow directors convey this, as well as Tyson’s subsequent transformation into the “beast” that D’Amato craved, via every flourish in the book, be it ceaseless cross-cutting, fast-forwarding and rewinding, disparate film and video stocks, super-slow-motion shots of boxing gloves crushing faces, soaring zooms into and out of close-up, and fourth wall-breaking commentary from Tyson, here charismatically embodied by Rhodes with the icon’s trademark high-pitched voice, lisp, and volatile mixture of ferocity and passivity. Mike moves at the blistering speed of one of Tyson’s classic first-round knockouts, all pummeling muscularity and whiplash movement. Each episode is jam-packed with details, most of them overtly articulated through exposition or thrown at the screen in a mad rush. Consequently, scant time is afforded to take stock of what’s happening or to investigate the thin psychologizing being peddled.
Tyson’s desire for a surrogate daddy ultimately leads him from positive role model D’Amato to exploitative criminal huckster Don King (Russell Hornsby), while his immaturity and insatiable appetites and arrogance help sabotage his marriage to Robin Givens (Laura Harrier), who’s cast by Mike as a domineering ball-buster with an even more overbearing mother (who believed that Tyson should ditch King for Donald Trump: “Now that’s a businessman you can trust”). Rather than imagining everyone in shades of gray, the show mostly posits its players as a mess of good and evil, victim and victimizer. The show’s razzle-dazzle pace does it no favors in this regard, racing so hurriedly through Tyson’s stratospheric rise that a sense of his awe-inspiring skill and mercilessness never fully materializes. TV’s third recent half-hour drama alongside The Bear and The Patient, Mike is biography in blazing bite-size form, gussied up with formal tricks that keep its subject at arm’s length.
If Mike never paints a wholly coherent picture of Tyson, it does find its footing when addressing the rape charges brought against the pugilist by Washington, a then-18-year-old college student and beauty pageant contestant who was sexually violated by the former champ on July 19, 1991. Ditching Tyson’s smug, self-conscious stage patter in order to center Washington’s first-person account of her ordeal, it’s a patient and thorough censure of Tyson as an entitled and gluttonous fiend who took what he wanted and ignored the potential consequences, as well as an empathetic celebration of a woman who stood up to a rich and powerful celebrity—and the myriad defenders who stuck by his side—and, in doing so, fought valiantly to not let others define her. By fixating on Washington instead of Tyson during this episode, Mike finally assumes a POV on its protagonist, and an unflattering one at that, highlighted by Tyson stating to both Washington and the camera (as he leads her out of the hotel room where he’s violated her), “You don’t love me no more.”
Only at this point does Mike seem to have something meaningful to say about Tyson, who otherwise recites his ordeals with a playfully unrevealing grin and a shrug. That we learn the most about Iron Mike through another person’s experience speaks volumes about the limits of Gillespie, Rogers and Gist’s cheeky approach, and about their own apparently conflicted attitude toward Tyson, whom they envision as a combination of a fun-loving cartoon, a tragically flawed Raging Bull-style figure, an extraordinary athlete, and a scary predator. What the show makes of this damaged, out-of-control, violent man is never quite clear—perhaps because, in the final tally, he’s not so much complex as merely the ugly byproduct of traumatic external forces and wild, pitiless internal impulses.
