F- You All: The Uwe Boll Story (2018)

(On Cable TV, November 2019) It’s still a bit early to definitively state that Uwe Boll will never direct another movie, but even in youthful retirement he leaves behind a distinctive filmography rich in fascinating material. In case you don’t know Boll, let us be clear: His films are terrible, but he was able to make a lot of them (twenty-two of them in ten years) thanks to savvy use of financing opportunities and a casual disregard for quality. For the generation of movie reviewers working between 2004 and 2015, Boll was a punchline until he became the one doing the punching—literally: in 2006, he dared movie reviewers to a boxing match. Some of them, forgetting that Boll had a semi-professional pugilistic background, accepted … and got beaten up. Stories like that are legion about Boll, who easily takes a spot on anyone’s list of pugnacious directors. He exploited tax loopholes; he shot in miserable conditions; he shot first drafts of scripts against the screenwriters’ wishes; he rarely spent more than a few takes before deciding to move on. This documentary’s biggest contribution, besides capturing the insanity of Boll’s career in easily digestible format, is to explain why Boll’s films were so terrible. It’s all about the money, of course. Or, if you want to be more precise, that Boll had a gift for getting money, but as a producer of his own films often sacrificed any artistic ambition in order to further his agenda as a budget-conscious producer. Unusually enough, Boll himself is not always his best advocate in interview segments filmed for this documentary—often, the best insights come from collaborators and friends trying to figure out what they saw or felt on the set. Boll himself is often argumentative, unrepentant, apparently unwilling to provide answers. It makes for good footage, obviously: Boll is a consummate showman in his own way, and he has chosen combativeness as a way of getting attention. Still, anyone looking for definitive answers may have to wait longer: As of the film’s shooting, Boll was still somewhat in the entertainment business, now being a successful Vancouver-area restaurateur. Both the movie and the restaurant world are better for it. Writer-director Sean Patrick Shaul should be proud of having explored the mystique behind the character, even if the answers he gets are tentative at best and not quite supported by the man himself. Anyone who has bemoaned the lack of grander-than-life directors after the passing of Howard Hawks, John Ford, or Joseph Von Sternberg (this being the last time Boll will be compared to those three) should have a look at this documentary—his movies are still not good, but now we have a record of Boll himself.