For the first time I met Richard Davisinventor of the hidden bulletproof vest, this was long before the famed director Ramin Bahranidocumentary 2nd chance about his rise and fall, which premiered this year Sundance Film Festival. Instead, it was in Red Letter Media’s 2020 Christmas video, where the group drunkenly discussed one of the films the inventor made himself, with a combination of morbid infatuation and bewilderment. They tried to understand why he acted out what can only be loosely called skits, opened fire on the car until it caught fire, and shot himself in the chest in a vest at close range. Although this was many years before the documentary was released, it was, oddly enough, the perfect introduction as it showed what it was like to witness this man’s strangeness while having many unanswered questions about what his whole weird deal.
While there are many of the same shots that then explain how it all happened, Bahrani’s documentary takes us deeper into what Davis envisioned and is doing now. While the streams have seen a flood of sloppy true-crime documentaries trying to survive only on the savagery of their story, this film transcends the spectacle and sees what lies beyond its eccentric surface. He’s still wildly entertaining and isn’t afraid to lean on the absurdity of it all to look at its nuances.
As we hear from Bahrani himself in one of the many moments when he talks about his thought process in approaching the subject, “what attracted [him] Richard had his contradictions.” There are moments that are darkly funny as we see Davis’ blatant hypocrisy and hateful tendencies rear their heads despite him often praising himself as a great guy, although he eventually reaches a point where any laughter due to controversy is replaced by sadness. While the documentary doesn’t always reveal the full depth of its subject matter, the way Bahrani handles the story delicately ensures that it cuts through the noise.
That in itself is definitely a commitment, as Davis likes to make a lot of noise. Whether it’s guns, explosives, or his own mouth, we see this man masking his insecurities with excess. For a while, this seemed to work as he created a thriving business that made him something of a local celebrity who ended up sitting behind the then president. George Bush. From these first moments, we can already see the writing on the wall that something is going to go wrong. Never shown, Bahrani watches patiently as Davis created what is essentially a character he himself must live in, the first of many lies he tells the world.
He says he was motivated by the concern of making vests to protect people, which he would personally test so that he wouldn’t put anyone at risk without doing it himself. It was actually a ploy to create a mythology around yourself, your ego, and your business, which proved to be incredibly effective at first. deifying Clint EastwoodDavis almost seemed to model his personality and worldview from the fantasies of acting films and then tried to create his own twisted versions. These bizarre and reactionary propaganda films served as publicity for his business. It’s part of the fact that the more we learn about the empire he created, the more we can see cracks begin to form.
Central to this is how Bahrani is refreshingly willing to ask tough questions of the oldest Davis. Too often it can seem like other documentarians unfortunately compromise their approach in order to keep access to their subjects and only slightly challenge them. Bahrani exposes this, ensuring that Davis will have to answer for many of the cruelties and deceptions we uncover. The director does it calmly but firmly when we hear his measured voice during numerous interviews. This means that we are putting Davis on the record based on what many others who have contacted him say about who he was. Although his last film was fictional, it is reminiscent of Bahrani’s 2021 unseen adaptation. white tiger in how it maintains clarity of purpose. This makes documentaries more journalistic in design, as we see the fragile excuses and explanations that their subject provides fall apart, piece by piece after painful piece.
The film is an exploration of Davis’ character with the world he lived in, but he never leaves it untouched. While there are times when it could and should have been a bit more complete, especially in terms of some of the things that happen in the video that we don’t see, it all happens for a reason. While we’ve entered this story with Davis in the spotlight, the documentary is also poised to move away from him completely and zoom out into a larger context. Although the inventor was a power figure obsessed with twisting the world to his advantage, Bahrani is defiantly trying his best to step out of his shadow and not let his corruption dominate history.
In one particular episode, as we near the end, the two people that Davis pitted against each other get together. They do this to come to terms with their shared past and the pain they inflict on each other. It gives a glimpse of what a better world can be that isn’t defined by deceit and greed. This opens the door to the hard work of forgiveness and compassion, which epitomizes the film’s title more than the corporation Davis created. Though fleeting, it is a portrait of people decent to each other that serves as the kind of intriguing rebuttal that Bahrani offers before it all comes to an end. It is through the willingness to go beyond the headlines and discover something else about humanity that 2nd chance reveals a deeper sense of the truth of his scandalous story.
Rating: B+
2nd chance now in cinemas.
Source: Collider
