{"id":745107,"date":"2026-04-22T10:11:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T10:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/745107\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T10:11:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T10:11:15","slug":"hulk-hogan-real-american-review-netflixs-four-hour-puff-piece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/745107\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Hulk Hogan: Real American’ Review: Netflix’s Four-Hour Puff Piece"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tNetflix<\/a>\u2018s Hulk Hogan<\/a>: Real American, Bryan Storkel\u2019s four-part tribute to the late wrestling legend, is not a documentary for people who especially care about \u201cgood\u201d documentaries.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a documentary for people who care about Hulk Hogan \u2014 but only truly care in-depth about the admirable parts of Hulk Hogan\u2019s mythic life and will surely be happier with a mediocre documentary that accentuates those parts, rather than a good documentary that offers substance or depth.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tHulk Hogan: Real American\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA four-hour puff piece.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAirdate: <\/strong>Wednesday, April 22 (Netflix)
Director: <\/strong>Bryan Storkel\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd Hulk Hogan: Real American<\/a> is absolutely that mediocre documentary, so enjoy!<\/p>\n

\n\tPut a different way, here are three key data points regarding Hulk Hogan: Real American: Firstly, the title is wholly in earnest and not an interrogation of what it means to be Hulk Hogan and what it means to be a \u201creal American,\u201d for better or worse. Secondly, the documentary is produced \u201cin association\u201d with WWE Entertainment, which has a lucrative partnership with Netflix. Thirdly, the president of the United States appears in the documentary \u2014 a low-energy appearance that would have caused a director with journalistic instincts to ponder, \u201cIf I interview the president of the United States and he\u2019s a dismal interview subject, is it okay to cut the president of the United States?\u201d Instead, he\u2019s here amply and substance-free.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe truth is that I\u2019m probably the only Netflix subscriber to watch Hulk Hogan: Real American primarily because of Storkel\u2019s name. The director, and wife Amy, worked together on the entertainingly silly The Pez Outlaw<\/a> and the recent SXSW premiere I Got Bombed at Harvey\u2019s<\/a>, two docs that chronicled eccentric, larger-than-life characters with distinctive style and admirable empathy.<\/p>\n

\n\tHulk Hogan: Real American has no appreciable style to speak of and, instead of empathy, it has admiration; those aren\u2019t the same things \u2014 at least not if you\u2019re attempting to create a nuanced portrait of a complicated life. The fourth episode of Hulk Hogan: Real American even trots out Werner Herzog to give a thesis statement for a far better documentary that I wish Herzog had made.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn the life of Hulk Hogan, what is reality? What is the real truth? Strangely enough, emotions are always truthful no matter how crazy and implausible the story might be. And searching for truth gives us dignity, gives us meaning,\u201d Herzog says, in exactly the way you\u2019d expect him to say it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe suggestion here \u2014 and in the Netflix logline for the series that begins \u201cBefore he was Hulk Hogan, he was Terry Bollea<\/a>\u201d \u2014 is that Hulk Hogan: Real American is going to dig deeply into performativity, American celebrity and the cult of professional wrestling. Instead, Hulk Hogan: Real American mostly talks about Hulk Hogan, not the human being beneath the bandanas (Terry likes bandanas, too) and yellow tights, and leaves us with the understanding that Terry Bollea was basically Hulk Hogan with the volume turned down by 15 to 20 percent. As revelations within searches for the truth go, it\u2019s anticlimactic.<\/p>\n

\n\tHulk Hogan: Real American does just fine with the easy parts of Hulk Hogan\u2019s life and celebrity \u2014 the unprecedented rise and extended plateau, during which he was one of the most recognizable and possibly one of the most beloved men in all of popular culture.<\/p>\n

\n\tBoasting large quantities of home movie footage and early wrestling materials, plus exhaustive access to Hogan, including the last interviews he conducted before his death in July 2025, the doc charts his journey from oversized Florida bass musician Terry Bollea to early wrestling personae including The Super Destroyer, Terry Boulder and The Incredible Hulk Hogan. (No mention is made of the legal agreement between Hogan and Marvel regarding use and presentation of the Hulk name, a footnote I\u2019ve always found very amusing.)<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m an \u201980s boy who watched an ample amount of wrestling from that period, as well as his Saturday morning animated series Hulk Hogan\u2019s Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll Wrestling and his various media-saturating commercials and cameos, so I have no trouble stirring up nostalgia for The Hulkster and the rise of Hulkamania. An awful lot of the biggest names in Hogan\u2019s sphere passed away relatively young, and it\u2019s hard not to miss Andre the Giant and Randy Savage and Roddy Piper, among others. <\/p>\n

\n\tA lot of Hogan\u2019s peers make appearances, from Jesse Ventura, on his best behavior to an unconvincing degree, to Jimmy Hart and Bret Hart and Ted Dibiase, while several more contemporaries feature in an extended \u201cPeople find out Hulk Hogan died and nod sadly\u201d montage in the finale. But for all the respect people hold him in, very few of those contemporaries are all that candid or voluble about Hogan.<\/p>\n

\n\tLinda, Hogan\u2019s first wife, is an excitable and constant presence, as is son Nick, but daughter Brooke is nowhere to be seen. It\u2019s one thing for the documentary to say that it wants to introduce us to Terry Bollea as a contrast to Hulk Hogan, but there are very few people here who actually know\/knew Terry Bollea \u2014 and for most of its first three hours, the doc just conflates the two without qualification.<\/p>\n

\n\tA bigger absence is anybody with the last name \u201cMcMahon,\u201d particularly Vince. Brooke Hogan and Vince McMahon are heard in unattributed audio, exactly enough so that people who don\u2019t pay attention will be under the impression that they participated in the documentary, even if they definitely did not. A variety of WWE figures, including Bruce Prichard and Paul \u201cTriple H\u201d Levesque, are on hand to talk about Hulk\u2019s importance to the company and the brand. Levesque even gets to discuss the decision to fire Hulk in the aftermath of various mid-\u201910s controversies, but when he claims that he fired Terry Bollea and not Hulk Hogan, it comes across as a distinction without a difference.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt some point, it becomes remarkable how tentative the documentary is when it comes to anything genuinely problematic or troubling in Hogan\u2019s life and image. His protracted legal tussle with Richard Belzer over an incident\/assault on Belzer\u2019s Hot Properties? Mentioned and acknowledged, but I\u2019m not sure you\u2019d understand why it\u2019s notable. His testimony in Vince McMahon\u2019s 1994 drug trial? Presented mostly as evidence of Hogan\u2019s heroism and, owing to McMahon\u2019s absence, raced through in a way likely to confuse anybody looking for a meaningful takeaway. A 1996 sexual assault accusation and counter-suit for extortion? Definitely not included.<\/p>\n

\n\tThose are biographical details that would come before the formal \u201cdownfall\u201d segment of the documentary, which is the bulk of the disjointed, heavily glossed-over 78-minute finale. That episode races through the Gawker suit<\/a> in a superficial and one-sided way that features no voices from the Gawker side and never mentions the name \u201cPeter Thiel.\u201d The documentary has no choice but to acknowledge the \u201cracial slurs\u201d angle of the sex tape story, though if you\u2019re unsure what the \u201cslurs\u201d actually were, nobody says and the audio isn\u2019t played. Hulk has an entire, 10-year second marriage that the documentary mostly pretends didn\u2019t exist, while the affair that contributed to the end of his marriage to Linda is treated as a regretful one-off, talked about less than Linda\u2019s own retaliatory affair.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnything dark in Hogan\/Bollea\u2019s life was cured by his third wife \u2014 as well as finding Jesus and finding Donald Trump. Those two events are treated as parallel, though the latter is more triumphant than the former; Donald Trump is a mumbling talking head here and Jesus is not.<\/p>\n

\n\tHogan\u2019s death, which took everybody \u2014 including the filmmakers \u2014 by surprise, is acknowledged as at least somewhat a product of the professional wrestling lifestyle, but it also imposes a finality and a reverential tone that does the documentary no favors.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s something poignant about all the footage of an aging Hogan being propped up by younger wrestlers in the ring, but being unable to get out of the spotlight due to financial need and contractual obligations. There\u2019s a version of this documentary that could take a serious look at the toll of wrestling on Hogan and his prematurely aged and deceased colleagues. Maybe that documentary would have pondered the exploitation of these men (and a couple of women) over decades and how that might not have happened if professional wrestlers had successfully unionized in the \u201980s. But that would have required Hulk Hogan: Real American to admit that one of the wrestlers who allegedly opposed that unionization effort was Hulk Hogan.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a smart and pragmatic documentary about Hulk Hogan, professional wrestling and the shaping of fin de si\u00e8cle American identity (and the rise of Hulk\u2019s buddy in the White House). Instead, we get this gap-filled piece of memorializing, corporate-backed hagiography. The Hulk Hogan: Real American target audience probably is happier this way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Netflix\u2018s Hulk Hogan: Real American, Bryan Storkel\u2019s four-part tribute to the late wrestling legend, is not a documentary…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":745108,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,59638,306984,53,4659,94944,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-745107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-hulk-hogan","tag-hulk-hogan-real-american","tag-movies","tag-netflix","tag-terry-bollea","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116447824296589156","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=745107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/745108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=745107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=745107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=745107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}