The Reel Review
This Netflix crime documentary profiles McAfee antivirus software founder John McAfee, who, after being sought for questioning in the November 2012 shooting death of his next-door neighbor in Belize, went on the run for eight years before his capture in Spain on tax evasion charges in the U.S. and subsequent death by apparent suicide in his jail cell a year later in 2021.
The documentary centers around journalists and writers whom the eccentric business tycoon invited to document his bizarre time on the run. First fleeing to Guatemala, then to the U.S., then to a life on a yacht in international waters, journalists traveling with him show a gun-toting narcissist whom they say was frequently high on bath salts, drunk and shockingly paranoid that everyone – from foreign governments to drug cartels – wanted to kill him.
While the film has plenty of lurid, ludicrous moments, the narrative itself is an unfocused effort, barely skimming the surface of McAfee’s life on the run. Interviews with the journalists and writers who followed McAfee offer a brief respite from the lunacy, but they do little else to forward the plot. In the closing credits, former girlfriend Samantha Herrera makes an unsubstantiated claim that McAfee is alive and faked his suicide, but like the latter years of his own life, this documentary is a hot mess.
REEL FACTS
• John McAfee unsuccessfully sought the Libertarian Party nomination for U.S. President twice while on the run – in 2016, ultimately coming in third at the National Convention, and again in 2020, before withdrawing and subsequently failing to progress past the first round of voting for Vice President.
• The family of the McAfee’s dead next-door neighbor, restauranteur Gregory Faull, in 2013 won $25 million in a wrongful death civil suit filed against McAfee in the United States, which McAfee never paid.
• McAfee’s widow, Janice, who now lives in San Francisco with her three children, continues to post news articles and retweets to her former husband’s 1.1 million followers in her campaign to get Spain to release McAfee’s remains and conduct an independent autopsy.
Video & Photo
