Tyson makes a big deal about what it is that makes a man a hero or a coward, but the movie is too timorous to venture an opinion as to which category Mike Tyson (Michael Jai White) belongs in.
According to Tyson’s first manager Cus D’Amato (George C. Scott), “It’s what the hero does that makes him a hero. It’s what the other guy doesn’t do that makes him a coward.”
Actually, what a man does do can be just as cowardly — like beating his wife (or biting off his opponent’s ear, although that happened after the film was released), which Tyson admitted to doing in the book that this biopic is based on (and would joke about, years later, on the Oprah Winfrey show).
It’s not impossible that José Torres’s Fire and Fear is, as Tyson claimed in his own autobiography, “filled with inaccuracies,” particularly regarding Tyson’s treatment of women (for example, that he “like[s] to hurt women” during sex, and “to hear them scream with pain, to see them bleed” gives him “pleasure”).
Maybe Tyson never really bragged that the best punch he ever threw in his life was one that sent Robin Givens flying “backward, hitting every fucking wall in the apartment” (the prose is certainly hyperbolic. “Hitting every fucking wall in the apartment”? Were they living inside a giant pinball machine?).
The filmmakers seem to have taken their own chosen source material with a grain of salt and decided it would be best to err on the side of caution; thus, Tyson is never seen physically assaulting Givens (Kristen Wilson).
But then, Torres “also provides an unflattering portrait of a greedy Givens” and her mother Ruth Roper (Sheila Wills), and scriptwriter Robert Johnson and director Uli Edel had no trouble following suit (Ruth even begrudges Tyson, though not to his face, that he’s “paying all of [Tyson’s adoptive mother] Camille’s bills”).
Additionally, Givens is depicted as a con artist who tricked Tyson into marrying her with a fake pregnancy that never shows, followed by a fake miscarriage.
Givens’s character is summed up thus: “I know for a fact she never went to medical school, Harvard or any other [as it turns out, even a lowly, nameless reporter can’t ask her a question without referring to her as “a woman who went to Sarah Lawrence and reportedly to Harvard Medical School.” If Givens were as ruthless as she’s made out to be, do you think she would have left that “reportedly” slide?]. Just as I also know for a fact she was never one of the Ford Agency’s top models, as she so often likes to claim … this is a woman with larceny in her heart.”
That description is put in the mouth of Don King (Paul Winfield), hardly a paragon of virtue himself; however, you get the feeling that what the filmmakers were trying to say here was, ‘it takes one to know one.’
None of that will do. What’s good for the goose ought to be good for the gander; either you give both Tyson and Givens the benefit of the doubt, or neither. At worst, Edel and Johnson were cherry-picking; at best, they just skimmed through the book.
Tyson’s childhood is reduced to a single, random, most likely apocryphal incident in which he shoots at some unknown people for some unspecified reason. This episode has no more catalyst than it has an aftermath (Tyson was arrested numerous times as a preteen; this wasn’t one of those occasions).
There are two other young people in Tyson’s household — the only acknowledgement that he had a brother and a sister. His mother we only see in a photograph at her wake (Mama Tyson, we hardly knew ye). Maybe the point is that she was a deadbeat mom, but who can tell?
Flash forward to 1979, Tyson goes to live with D’Amato (Tyson, who was 13 in ‘79, must have been big for his age, being played by a White who is just a year and change younger than the boxer). D’Amato’s common-law wife (Lilyan Chauvin) isn’t thrilled about having “another mouth to feed,” seeing as how they already “got a half a dozen fighters staying here” — one of whom ate D’Amato’s ice cream, much to his chagrin.
The other six guys follow the rule that children should be seen and not heard, except that they’re not seen either. Camille (to whom Tyson somehow endears himself in between scenes) needn’t have worried because Tyson’s is the only mouth getting fed, and as for the ice cream, perhaps a ghost ate it?
Tyson’s love life is similarly glossed over. He gets the clap from an anonymous floozy and then marries Givens after one date (if you can call fucking in the back of a limo a date).
Generally, I wouldn’t give two shits about formative years and romantic subplots; then again, clearly neither did the filmmakers — showing such little interest in his background, it’s no wonder that the movie provides no insight into Tyson’s psyche.
Tyson ends with the title character going to prison for raping beauty pageant contestant Desiree Washington (Rebekah Johnson). Whatever the film thinks happened between Tyson and Washington, it doesn’t show; whether it thinks he was guilty or not, it keeps to itself.
The movie can’t even be said to present the facts for the audience to make an informed decision because, well, let’s just say that it skips the trial altogether.
All things considered, Tyson is a glorified scandal sheet, and it was made for no other purpose than to cash in on the notoriety of its subject.
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