Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem Review
Director: Shianne Brown
Date Created: 2025-06-17 23:19
3.5
Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem Review: Executive produced by RAW and BBH, and directed by Shianne Brown, this 49-minute documentary chronicles the highs and lows of the most talked-about politician to emerge from Toronto in years. It tries in its brief lifespan to capture the insanity of Rob Ford’s reign, from hero on the home turf to international laughing stock. Interviews with journalists, political strategists, and Ford’s own loyalists help construct the depressing narrative of a man who was so much a media celebrity as a cautionary tale.
Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem Review
We’re aware in the first scene that this is not going to be your typical political documentary. The narration is brisk, quick and loose, but rooted firmly in its titillating real-life material. And, naturally, I have to concede that I was entertained by it, but there were moments when I was getting fairly irritated with how far it dived into the Rob Ford saga.
Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem does manage to demonstrate that Rob Ford was a far more complicated individual than perhaps we could have been made to think. He was not your average suit-and-tie politician, and they appreciated him for it. The film contends that Ford’s actual accessibility and “everyman” personality make him popular with the blue-collar, automobile-industry labourers of the city and provide them with a voice.
Whether it was taking calls himself, dropping by unexpectedly to assist a neighbour with a tree removal, or making pizzas, Ford formed a connection so many aspiring politicians can write a book about, but can’t exactly claim they are a full paid-up member of. That’s the grass-roots, underdog triumph part of the tale, that’s exhilaratingly invulnerable, and the Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem documentary gets that energy absolutely right.
But where the accidents pile up, Trainwreck lives up to its title. Each slab on his slide is cut with clips and interviews of appalling stupidity and drug use and alcohol abuse, public blunders, deceptions, and filthy politics. And yet, even though I was having a good time, I wished the movie would just top its thrill, because so much of the narrative was struggling with hasty conjunctions.
The greatest thing and, admittedly, the worst thing about the documentary? Its length. It’s not humanly possible for it to be sufficient when Trainwreck Mayor of Mayhem documentary, with a mere 49 minutes in which to fit what refuses to try to contain a seemingly impossible volume of controversy, legacy and feeling, there isn’t much square footage available for anything subtle. Critical politics and events of Ford’s personal life, such as Ford’s words in his early time as a city councillor, or the subtleties of Ford’s relationship with his family, are mentioned but not examined in any meaningful sense.
And the same math can also be brought to bear on the bigger political record of Ford just being himself in Toronto, that is: what did what he believed in actually do to the city? What has shifted for the voters and the council since Ford? And those are the questions the documentary would seem to skate over instead of facing.
Also Read: 6 Cdramas like The Prisoner of Beauty That Nailed the Enemies-to-Lovers Trope
But I also like that the film never really feels a need to completely let Ford off the hook, either. It never exonerates him as a misunderstood hero, but it doesn’t flat-out demonise him, either. In that balance, revealing us both his finest intentions and his constant screw-ups, the film is a success. I found myself, I felt, as though I’d just witnessed not only the tale of a mayor, but a man struggling with his own demons in front of a city, and one who more and more seemed not to be coming out on top of that struggle between power, addiction, and, it seemed, denial.
The documentary’s strongest point was that it finally got in person all of the individuals who originally broke Ford’s crack cocaine story, headed by Robyn Doolittle. Her evidence contributes a badly needed modicum of credibility and urgency to the narrative. So, too, when she recounts how she never bought the rare video that depicted Ford with drugs, except that, well, then it became a phenomenon in the American media — that says volumes about just how convoluted and morally complex this entire saga was. Those scenes provided the documentary with a spine.
But if I’m going to be finicky, I wish the documentary lingered longer unravelling the role played by the media in crafting the legacy of Rob Ford. Was the media fixated on sensationalising his nadir for ratings? Or was their coverage of a public figure a public service unto itself?
Trainwreck Mayor of Mayhem Review: Summing Up
The Rob Ford story is not just a tragic tale of scandal — it’s a cautionary tale about how easily charming is conflated with “leader,” and how easily a “man of the people” can drive off the road, leaving behind only wreckage in his path, when no one is man enough—or woman enough, for that matter — to say no. And despite all this messaging, this film gets the job done.
Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem is a compulsive watch, but I left feeling cheated. A breakneck, high-wire piece of storytelling concerning a larger-than-life political personality whose life is like that of a live-action satirist, half comedy and half horror and all indelible. I wasn’t emotionally destroyed or mentally discombobulated at the conclusion, but I was captivated throughout.
