{"id":54802,"date":"2025-09-10T08:52:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T08:52:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/54802\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T08:52:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T08:52:07","slug":"aka-charlie-sheen-review-netflix-documentary-is-frustrating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/54802\/","title":{"rendered":"“AKA Charlie Sheen” Review: Netflix Documentary Is Frustrating"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSPOILER ALERT: <\/strong>This article discusses in detail the docuseries \u201caka Charlie Sheen<\/a>,\u201d now streaming on Netflix.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe biggest revelation in \u201caka Charlie Sheen<\/a>,\u201d a two-part documentary movie centered on the titular star, is never articulated by Sheen himself. Instead, the wunderkind-turned-sitcom-star, now eight years into hard-won sobriety, talks around the disclosure, using a tortured metaphor about restaurant menus to discuss his sexual appetites at the height of his addiction. It\u2019s left to his offscreen interlocutor, director Andrew Renzi (\u201cPaul American\u201d), to explicitly state what Sheen won\u2019t: that the actor has had sex with men<\/a>, an admission that quite evidently carries more weight for Sheen himself than it does for the viewer. (Or at least this viewer, anyway.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe exchange is indicative of this odd, frustrating, occasionally intriguing project, which pads out scarce but real nuggets of insight with leading questions and endless clips. So is the fact that Sheen helpfully lays out a neat, three-part structure for his life story \u2014 \u201cPartying,\u201d \u201cPartying with Problems\u201d and then just \u201cProblems\u201d \u2014\u00a0only for Renzi and his team to instead break \u201caka Charlie Sheen\u201d into two 90-minute chunks. A feature film could offer more focus and concision; an extended series could be more methodical in its portraiture, rather than skipping over chapters like Sheen\u2019s FX series \u201cAnger Management,\u201d getting killed off and replaced on \u201cTwo and a Half Men\u201d or his reconciliation with co-creator Chuck Lorre. Instead, \u201caka Charlie Sheen\u201d is stuck in between.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe most prominent voice in \u201caka Charlie Sheen\u201d is, of course, Sheen himself, clearly calmed down from the peak mania on display in his infamous 2011 interview<\/a> with Andrea Canning of ABC News but still retaining some irrepressible eccentricity. (His interviews are staged in an empty diner, because Sheen has a fondness for greasy spoons.) Sheen is joined by ex-wives Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller, with whom he shares two children each; his childhood friend Sean Penn, who grew up with the Sheen kids in Malibu; his brother Ramon Estevez; Lorre; and even Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss, against whom Sheen testified when a travelers\u2019 check identified him as one of her clients.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe clear standout of this group is Sheen\u2019s \u201cTwo and a Half Men\u201d co-star Jon Cryer, who offers a convincing and holistic assessment of the psychology driving Sheen\u2019s dysfunction. (Penn, smoking a cigarette in his own living room, contributes some thoughts on fame and drugs that are evocatively phrased, but too general to make much of an impression.) \u201cI don\u2019t know that he believes that he deserves what he\u2019s got,\u201d Cryer says of Sheen\u2019s famous father Martin and early success after a breakout cameo in \u201cFerris Bueller\u2019s Day Off\u201d \u2014\u00a0so he fell into a cycle of throwing it all away, then re-earning his place in the spotlight. Cryer is similarly observant toward Sheen\u2019s extended public meltdown, an early inflection point in the social media era in which onlookers got an exhilarating blow-by-blow of one man\u2019s downward spiral.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut even Cryer can\u2019t make as much of an impact in his active participation as the elder Sheen and Charlie\u2019s brother Emilio make in their absence. (An intertitle notes both Martin and Estevez declined to participate.) We get a fascinating recap of the Sheen children\u2019s visit to the notoriously beleaguered set of \u201cApocalypse Now,\u201d but not Martin\u2019s response to the idea that watching his father driven to the point of substance abuse and madness may have had a lasting effect on Charlie. Instead, \u201caka Charlie Sheen\u201d uses Martin and Charlie\u2019s shared scenes over the years as a flimsy substitute for the real thing, plus a bizarrely long summary of the time the pair played basketball with Michael Jordan on a forgotten celebrity game show.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201caka Charlie Sheen\u201d saves its newsiest nuggets for the very end, when Renzi clears the room and allows Sheen to share his perspective on his HIV diagnosis; sexual assault allegations<\/a> regarding\u00a0the late\u00a0Corey Haim, made by Haim\u2019s contemporary Corey Feldman \u2014 and his sexual experimentation. This climactic framing defers to Sheen\u2019s own perception of what\u2019s most important about his life, while Renzi\u2019s own interest seems to lie in salacious details like Sheen\u2019s first experience with crack cocaine (he was receiving oral sex at the time) and the time he shoved an ice cube up his own rectum to get through a scene while intoxicated (helpfully illustrated with an overlaid arrow). Other turning points, like Sheen\u2019s final commitment to sobriety, are simply glossed over. \u201caka Charlie Sheen\u201d purports to go beyond Sheen\u2019s worst, most publicized moments, but it mostly reveals how much the actor continues to live in their shadow.<\/p>\n

\n\tBoth episodes of \u201caka Charlie Sheen\u201d are now streaming on Netflix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses in detail the docuseries \u201caka Charlie Sheen,\u201d now streaming on Netflix. The biggest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[39804,32924,18,117,19,17,327],"class_list":{"0":"post-54802","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-aka-charlie-sheen","9":"tag-charlie-sheen","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-movies"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}