Day of Reckoning: Official Documentary (2024) Review
December's Saudi card, 'Day of Reckoning', has received a groundbreaking in-house documentary on DAZN. It begins as a sequel to the zombie-themed trailer that released as part of the fight promotion. Commercials have become movies before: Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny's Nike ads of the early 90s became Space Jam, Kit-Kat's 30th anniversary ads in Japan starred Hana & Alice before their acclaimed eponymous 2004 feature. The strangest example, again from Japan, is when Suntory Beer had the PAPiPU PENGUiNS as their mascots. This adorable Club Penguin looking couple were so popular that they would receive their own movie, Penguin's Memory: Shiawase Monogatari, a drama about the penguin condition where the main character has to recover from PTSD he got from serving in not-Vietnam.
As odd as all that sounds, Day of Reckoning has got to be the first ever documentary to open as a sequel to a commercial. It seems a way to fight the virus has been found as the boxers are seemingly unzombified, though it must be hard to spread good news to a zombified society (*SOCIAL COMMENTARY INTENSIFIES*). This was a specially recorded opening sequence, with actors playing the hard-to-see boxers. I suspect it was thrown in because the start of the actual documentary is quite dull.
The success of the Saudi event is briefly recapped, complete with a requisite shots of Cristiano Ronaldo sitting ringside, then there's a little behind the scenes chat with Michael Buffer before jumping back six weeks to the mid-range hotel exterior of Queensberry Promotions HQ.
Some people I do not know or care to know faff about hitting one of those punching bag arcade machines while the cameraman faffs about recording them and it carries on for too long. Remember the start of this article where I went on a tangent that ended with Japanese beer commercials becoming war movies? If this website had an editor they might tell me it's superfluous and to cut it, but it's in there and at least you read something hopefully new or interesting. I doubt anyone cares about the arcade high score that the commercial director at Queensberry Promotions gets. And this documentary did have an editor. Yet they didn't spare us the several attempts that he and some other guy take.
Frank Warren and Eddie Hearn are the first talking heads as they recall their first ever meeting. It's mindblowing that "two businessmen meet to do business together" is still being spun as a revolutionary moment rather than being par for the course. Then again, this is boxing. Eddie Hearn points out that it's ridiculous that the top two promoters in the UK had never even met. Gosh, if only he were in a position to remedy that. It did get a laugh out of me that Warren is the one who drops an F-bomb whilst Hearn decides to keep it clean when he recalls them agreeing "don't mess this up". World's gone topsy-turvy.
We're treated to more riveting discussions about contracts and it truly captures the frustrating vibe of modern boxing discourse. A sport with so few big fights that we're tiding ourselves over by talking about big fight negotiations. There have been boxing documentaries before but none who take the time to talk to a lawyer about how busy his job is. An actually interesting part of the negotiations that goes unmentioned is that the headliner should've been Joshua-Wilder, a behind the scenes look on why that fell through again would actually be an unprecedent level of access.
The description for this documentary is "Take a behind-the-scenes look and hear the inside scoop from those who made the historic Day of Reckoning event happen in the official documentary". Joseph Parker, the newest reason Joshua-Wilder fell through, is the first boxer we hear from almost a quarter of an hour into the film.
We usually see camp footage in the build-up to a fight, so it's a welcome novel approach to reframe 'this is why we're going to win' to 'this is why we won'. In the usual chronological approach you never find yourself thinking "maybe the new nutritionist actually was the deciding factor?" after a fight. But the potential for confirmation bias is also increased, as Malik Scott's eyes look shiftier than usual as he talks about how short Wilder's training camp is - though Wilder was his usual confident self. Filip Hrgovic is the last fighter we hear from before jumping ahead to fight night (don't worry, it jumps back later).
This documentary is not what you would call star-studded. Unless you consider Steve Bunce and Gareth A. Davies to be stars. Supermassive black holes of charisma might be more accurate. These talking heads are used as voiceovers over some stretches of boxing highlights, interspersed with commentary/punditry clips from the American, British, Latin America, and Saudi Arabian feeds of the fights. I don't speak Spanish and my Arabic is more than a little rusty, so subtitles wouldn't have gone amiss in these sections. Subtitles being available at all would've gone a long way to making things accessible actually. Alas, a production that didn't want to spend money on translators was likely never going to splurge out on interpreters for talking heads interviews with some of the international boxers.
Back to "28 days before the fight" as the documentary makers have to contend with trying to pay lip service to the unruly number of fights. Anthony Joshua sees himself growling as a zombie. "Lion!", says the pugilist. Bless his little cotton socks. Eddie Hearn explains that you can't just pat someone like AJ on the back and say go and take it to his opponent "because he's too bright for that" and "he needs to understand how". Your guess is as good as mine. Eddie Hearn must be too bright to know what bright means.
In his infinite wisdom, he goes on to do an autopsy of AJ's most recent losses. "That was the problem in the Usyk fight [sic]. He had no idea really about how to win that fight. He wasn't confident in the game plan. He didn't necessarily understand the game plan." You don't have to look very hard to find Hearn was singing a different tune before the rematch. What a bright chap.
This is ostensibly a boxing documentary. It hurt them to not do the obvious thing of speaking to the boxers who actually fought. Of course, the losers want to slink away and hide under a rock somewhere. They want to do that immediately after a fight too but we still expect them do post-fight interviews and press conferences. It's weird enough talking heads are all talking about the Day of Reckoning as though they're promoting a future event, it's downright comical that they're once again trying to convince me that Otto Wallin is a top opponent. Been there, done that, you couldn't sell me a t-shirt the first time. At the very least there's an attempt at creative editing as we cut back and forth from gym footage between the two camps. Shame that they couldn't afford a camera stabiliser though.
I completely forgot that Jarrell Miller was in Saudi Arabia until he showed up in this documentary, so it was fun to see this exchange with Joshua for the first time. Moments later it hit me that I completely forgot he was on the card too. This will be the go-to anecdote I use in future when I want to illustrate that a card can have too many fights. Unless I forget it again I suppose. The talking heads and a hypocritical Hearn spend some time moralising over Miller failing drugs tests without reflecting on their explicit support for his presence on the card.
Talking head Hearn casually offers that "this fight card has five fights too many" and that if he was running this card (what a bright chap), DuBois-Miller would've been dropped for being a really good fight they didn't need. Ade Oladipo concurs that you could "easily chop off about four fights on this card". Where were these common sense concerns about time when the card was being put together? For a documentary about how the Day of Reckoning came together, the main character - His Excellency - is a silent protagonist. It's left to everyone else to namedrop him and sing his praises whilst his seldom-seen opinions are unavailable. As one of the most important figures in boxing today (and a bigger boxing fan than Hearn or Oladipo by my reckoning), his absence is genuinely a shame. Showing how he and his team came up with the name of the event, the running order etc is something many fans would love to be privy to.
Back to 10 days before the fight and we're introduced to "the pound-for-pound star Dimitri [sic] Bivol" training in Kyrgyzstan. They spent so much time moralising over Miller's drugs use that there was no time left to mention allegations of domestic abuse made by Bivol's wife. A documentary about the prevalence of toxic masculinity and hostility to women in the world of men's professional boxing would be quite interesting though it would likely have to be a multi-part series.
In the only title fight of the evening, Bivol's opponent is more an afterthought than Agit Kabayel and Arslanbek Makhmudov, with Lyndon Arthur not being named until archive commentary mentions him as the bell to end the 12th rings. Things quickly move onto the co-headliners. Eddie Hearn reminds us that Saudi Arabia is a land where "things can happen very quickly. And if someone wants it to happen, generally, it will happen." He's speaking about the Joshua-Wilder fight that didn't happen. "It's closer than it's ever been.", he assures us. What a bright chap.
The last quarter of the film is another long stretch of Wilder-Parker & Joshua-Wallin highlights. Generic orchestral music swells over shots of slowmotion punches and it reminds me of any number of uninspired sports montages. Would it kill these filmmakers to make a boxing reel that's scored by something out of left field like noir jazz or electronic music? The genre described as 'epic' or 'cinematic' on countless Youtube playlists is played out. For the love of Jah, take a risk and do something new for once.
The final scene would be fairly hype if we didn't already know how the story ends. It's easy to imagine that they considered using it as a post-credits scene, like it was introducing the next antagonist of the Heavyweight Boxing Cinematic Universe. Overall, this documentary doesn't deal too much with new information and doesn't do enough to contextualise old information. I called it ground-breaking because these look-back type documentaries are rare (especially so soon after an event) and because it is a continuation of a trailer, which is still bonkers. Producer/director Tom Day also made a 'Battle of the Baddest' documentary for Netflix about the Fury-Ngannou fight, though I don't have Netflix and nobody has uploaded it elsewhere so don't expect me to cover that one.
In future, it would help if they have a stronger sense of who the target audience of these documentaries is. Fight fans who already watched the cards and want to reminisce? Or new viewers who know nothing of boxing and want an entry point? At the moment it feels like they're trying do to both but don't know how to deliver on either. And despite the cinematic influence, by its very nature it can be hard to zero in on a main character or storyline in boxing. Fictional commercials and fictional movies give you complete control over the characters and their universe. The filmmakers have not yet found a satisfying way to overcome or circumnavigate that lack of control in documentary form.
Final Review Scores
In a word: Meh
In a sentence: Too much Edwardo Hearn and "Buncey"
In a number: 6.43
In an emoji: 🥱
In an element of the periodic table: Bismuth
Day of Reckoning is available for free on DAZN.
Director/Producer: Tom Day (We Go Again Studios)
Production companies: Saudi General Entertainment Authority, Sela, BigTime Creative Shop, and We Go Again.
Runtime: 01:19:14