This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Rattlebones’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
This is an odd one.
The movie starts off strong, detailing Marbury's rise in 1990s New York. Bringing in New York street ball legends, his family, and Cam and Fat Joe, it's exciting and the style suits his meteoric rise.
From there it goes into his time in the NBA, but unfortunately provides very little information about what happened behind the scenes. Marbury's problems are vague - he was on bad teams, he was homesick, he didn't know how to handle the media. Obviously, his father's death had a profound effect on him. But even his breakdown afterwards is not described as such.
Moreover, they gloss over the incredibly insensitive climate of sport's media at the time. The way they treated Delonte West and Marbury is appalling and still hasn't really be accounted for.
Still, the idea that a Jordan documentary, made by ESPN, could be more candid than a Marbury one made by Netflix and Slam is very telling.
But then, we get to his time in China. And that's when it gets really odd.
Obviously, the CBA was good for Marbury. I do think it ultimately was good for him and gave this former child star the space he needed.
On the other hand, it must have been a profoundly strange journey. And we don't really get to learn anything about it. Moreover, Marbury finally appears, and we get a bit of footage of him seeming happy, which is great, but also having sort of strange conversations.
Marbury is a really fascinating story, but unfortunately this doc does not do it justice at all.