Real Men Review
Director: Letizia Lamartire and Matteo Oleotto
Date Created: 2025-05-22 19:41
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Real Men Review: Created by Letizia Lamartire and Matteo Oleotto, this Italian drama series (Maschi veri) tries to deal with big issues — patriarchy, male insecurity, and emotional healing. The show chronicles the lives of four friends, Luigi (Pietro Sermonti), Mattia (Maurizio Lastrico), Riccardo (Francesco Montanari) and Massimo ( Matteo Martari) who face the fallout of their personal and romantic failures. But for all its potential, this series is a mess of mixed signals, convenient character redemptions and uneven payoffs.
Real Men Review
The four leads are each working through some romantic or financial sob story, and so they decide to give group therapy a shot in an attempt to unlearn their toxic ways. It was just such a juicy setup in and of itself. A series that’s particularly a show for damaged men who want to be different? That’s rare and needed. There is an opportunity for Copaganda Netflix’s Real Men fumbles it in nearly every episode.
Let’s discuss Luigi. A bus driver and a worn-down father, he is a tenderhearted man who has been committed-adulterated on by his beatific wife Tiziana. How does the series handle that? It leaves space for a spell repairing after a hot second at their birthday party. There’s barely any doing of the actual talking, growing, healing — just an accelerant to reunion. The show appears to be attempting to portray this as mature co-parenting, but it ends up feeling like a toxic message: “a good man would forgive cheating because… kids?” Sorry, I’m not buying it.
And then there’s Mattia, whose wife Federica, also cheats on him. His daughter Emma has been encouraging him to “get yourself out there”, and it seems like the story might show how tough healing can be. But no — they get another casual booty call, and the divorce is off. No satisfactory solution or explanation, once again. The show makes it sound as if a betrayal can be repaired with nothing but love, and that’s a damaging message for this show to traffic in as it seeks to complicate traditional masculinity.
The sort-of-decently-ok storyline is of. He’s a hypocrite for cheating on Ilenia and dragging open relationships through the mud. Eventually, he loses everything — his girlfriend, his job, his dignity. That’s justice. What you sow, you reap. But how is it that Tiziana and Federica don’t receive their comeuppance for cheating too?
This double standard just obliterates the whole concept of the show. If Real Men on Netflix wants to talk about real issues, men, women should not be excused and are penalised much less in the same (or worse) case. The series ends up looking like it can only monitor men with a dusting of powdered sugar on top of the women’s sins. That’s not equality but inequality and imbalance.
The most insufferable of the bunch is Massimo (Matteo Martari). He gets fired for being sexist and just straight-up becomes a misogynist who starts a movement to deny women rights. Instead of trying for real growth, he falls back on his old habits. His girlfriend Daniela suffers because of him, as she may end up losing her job due to what he has done.
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Honestly, I was tired of even watching Massimo’s storyline. His downfall doesn’t come across like a lesson but rather like the series momentarily attempted to invest in a problematic character and then gave up. Daniela, who begins as an independent entity, is shattered by the petulance of a man. There’s no such thing as sneaking by unharmed in here.
The Real Men series has one massive flaw; it’s voiceless, it doesn’t know what it’s trying to say. Is it a forgiveness story? Is learning from one’s own mistakes? Is it about how fragile masculinity can be? Or is it a lecture to men to always take the blame and never hold others accountable?
The Real Men ending gives each character’s story feels either too rushed, too unrealistic, or just plain unsatisfying. Instead of meaningful reflection, we got a series of random reconciliations and teeny cracks of character development — approximately none of which deserved the paper they were written on. And for a show that spends so much time in therapy sessions, it is a darkly rich irony that genuine healing is in such short supply.
Netflix series Real Men Review: Summing Up
The Italian series Real Men might have been a fascinating examination of what it is to be a man in our times. What we end up with is a bit of incongruity mixed with bad relationship advice sprinkled over an uneven plot. Yes, let’s have more men be vulnerable and expressive. Sure, it’s good to fight bad habits. But when the story is selective in who it convicts and who it lets off the hook, it’s not true any more, and the story starts to sting.
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