Las Vegas Weekly

May 15, 2009 · 1:28 PM

Mike Tyson docu-drama Tyson is a weekend contender

By Robin Leach

Mike Tyson.

Photo: Scott Doctor/www.greatscottstudios.com

A year ago, it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won raves for its brutal honesty and candor. Now Tyson, a documentary look at the troubled world of former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, is getting its theatrical release. The movie starring our Las Vegas sports figure opens today.

Click HERE for our Las Vegas Weekly colleagues’ take on Tyson, and you can view the trailer at www.tyson-film.com. It is a warts-and-all portrait of an ultimate sports legend who went off the rails, and his raw emotion comes through his rage and tears and when he finally admits to failure.

Tyson doesn’t shy away from the Robin Givens marital bust-up, his dealing drugs and first arrest at age 12, his outrageous ring behavior and a rape charge in which he served three years in jail.

Mike, who moved here, has been seen regularly at our restaurants and nightclubs, and now fully recovered and reformed, he’s always been polite, soft-spoken and a gentleman when I’ve talked with him. In the ring, of course, he was a god who had fellow boxers cowering beneath his blows.

Director James Toback, who financed the film, said that he always wanted it to be a self-portrait in the boxer’s own words. As he told Las Vegas Weekly’s Josh Bell, Mike’s reaction to the film is, “It’s like a Greek tragedy: The only problem is I’m the subject.”

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

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