Knockout Chaos Official Documentary (2024) review

I believe DAZN has room for improvement. Their service is bad and they should feel bad. This latest bout of ill will was inspired by yet another comical display of not doing the basics right. Pretend for a second that you're one of the few people in the world foolish enough to be a boxing fan, and you've heard for months that a new documentary is dropping on the self-styled "global home of boxing". Now, you can either Google it or find the Knockout Chaos documentary on the front page of DAZN.com - in either case, the link does not work. You might even be so foolish as to think your own toaster is to blame and attempt to open it on Chrome and Edge to no avail. It is at this point that you realise, it must be the multibillion dollar corporation who is wrong, and you eventually find the correct link. Why is there an incorrect link in the first place? I doubt we'll ever know.

What we do know is that this documentary picks up where the last one left off, with a shot of the Arabian dunes where Ngannou stood like Thanos sitting in his chair. The filmmakers adhere to the old maxim 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' as the success of the Saudi event is briefly recapped (with some minor rotoscoping), this time with requisite shots of Jose Mourinho sitting ringside, before jumping back ten weeks to the 'there's no such thing as too many chimneys' exterior of Matchroom Boxing HQ.

The documentary proper starts with reminiscing about December's Day of Reckoning event, as the people wholly responsible for Joshua-Wilder not happening lament that fight not happening. I noted in my review of the previous documentary that the headliner in December should've been Joshua-Wilder. This whole discussion should've been laid to rest in December, and their failures should've been dissected in that documentary. Rather than that, they chose to ressurect this dead horse for another beating.

Day of Reckoning's theme was zombies, the theme of Knockout Chaos was video games. Specifically boomer arcade machines from the 1980s and early 90s. A nightwatchman or perhaps a burglar wanders into an arcade and inserts a quarter into the game Knockout Chaos, instead of a Wreck-It-Ralphesque fantastical journey into a game the zoom transports us to a generic New York apartment exterior like it's the establishing shot for an episode of Friends.

The MMA-fan, wrestling-fan, and drama merchant Ariel Helwani gets to make the world-exclusive announcement for the boxing match between Joshua and Ngannou on one of his likkle livestreams. Followed by the Nottingham Forest plastic plugging The MMA Hour and recapping Ngannou's career for us. Not his MMA achievements of course, that would make too much sense in a combat sports documentary. The filmmakers figured we'd all be waiting with bated breath to be regaled with lore of Ngannou's contractual situation in the UFC and the social media response to it.

Ultimately, Ngannou's rags-to-riches story leads him to the world of professional boxing and his fight with Tyson Fury. We're assured that he "overcame the odds" in that match, though the fact that it was officially a split decision loss is quietly glossed over. In any case, we end up at the promotion for Knockout Chaos: The Fight.

Gareth A. Davies, this time appearing in some London backalley rather than as a talking head tells us that Joshua versus Ngannou is "is an event about power. Two great fighters. Two men of African-descent. It's another Rumble in The Jungle. Except we're doing it in Saudi Arabia." Sometimes I wonder if I'm too harsh on boxing media personalities. Those worries are always quickly assuaged.

Again, it's almost a quarter of an hour before we hear from a professional boxer. Though this time it's not even original footage, just recycled footage of Anthony Joshua speaking at the press conference. And to hammer home the point of who the star is, the camera angle keeps Edward Hearn in focus. The disrespect is compounded as Joshua's voice is faded out so Hearn can speak on his behalf instead.

Hearn gets to show off his limited storytelling abilities once more as he tells us of Joshua's ghetto background and run ins with the old bill, before boxing provided the guttersnipe with structure and saved his life. Do keep in mind that Edward Hearn is not a good boxing promoter. He's a phenomenal self-promoter, as evidenced by the fact that he's more famous than any Matchroom boxer other than Anthony Joshua. And Joshua won an Olympic gold medal without Hearn, he would've become a star no matter who he signed with. He likely would've been a more global attraction if he immediately made the move across the Atlantic.

Hearn cannot make stars because the narratives he weaves are as inspiring as Keir Starmer's voice. A young man was either saved from a life of delinquency or they're an exemplary "good kid". In his own words, "every boxer will tell you how boxing either changed or saved their life". After all these years he still cannot come up with anything more compelling than those copy-and-paste stories. He's more Dan Brown than Heywood Broun. The most interesting event of Anthony Joshua's career so far has been losing to Usyk twice and his reaction to the second loss in particular. The story behind it still hasn't been told despite it happening almost 2 years ago now. By the time they feel like getting around to exploring that saga, how many people will still care?

"Ah, motherf***", are Joshua's first words while descending into a post-workout bath. "Ah, f***." All that time spent around Hearn must've rubbed off on him. Thankfully, Hearn wasn't around to stop Joshua from sharing that he's felt like he might die after a fight. Those are the sort of intimate and unknowable insights spectators want to hear from fighters. The small amount of hope it gave me was shattered as we're back listening to Gareth A. Davies, Steve Bunce, Dev Sahni, and Ade Oladipo gushing over how much of a good kid Joseph Parker is before moving onto how scary Zhang is.

"He is the Great Wall of China, embodied." says Sahni. I don't remember if he appeared in the previous one but it was a wise move drafting in Andy Clarke to provide some actual analysis. There's an extended sequence where people sing the praises of Turki AlAlshikh (with some slyly tempering their words) but once more, we do not hear from the main man himself bar an endearing cameo at the end. Teddy Atlas coaches some kids in Riyadh's Tyson branded gym which is fine, it's just not "reliving a history-making night of boxing" as the documentary description says.

Boxercise Ben Davison gets so much undue hype that it sickened me to the point of almost turning the whole thing off.

"Ben Davison is so analytical. He is the guy that'll watch tape on a fighter over and over and over and find the smallest chink in the armour. He will literally look at a fighter's left hand, right hand, the feet, how the fighter moves when he's under pressure, how a fighter fights off the ropes. That's what Ben Davison has brought to boxing, which we probably didn't see [in boxing] before. [...] I think in about 10 years time we're gonna see a hundred Ben Davisons. 'cause I think they're all gonna be like that." - Ade Oladipo

One could make a serious case that Ben Davison, who has never fought before, is just one of the hundred Teddy Atlases we see today. The most leeway I can give them is that this was recorded before Haney was stunned to discover that Ryan Garcia likes throwing left hooks. Lee Wylie continues to lurk in the shadows... for now.

I said in my previous review that it was a novel approach to retroactively reframe 'this is why we're going to win' footage into 'this is why we won'. This documentary is only focussing on two fights, so it starts to wear thin hearing winning talk from the loser. The fight, which already came and went months ago, continues to be sold to us by father-son duo John and Tyson Fury, the latter telling us of his long-term fantasy fights as he has done for years. A great leap forward towards undisputed is surely coming any day now.

The obligatory Parker-Zhang and Joshua-Ngannou montages close the show. One thing I highly appreciate is that this is the most concerted and consistent 'a loss isn't the end of the world' messaging from a major stakeholder in boxing in years.

After seeing Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck the other day, it reminded me that documentaries can be artful. At no point in that picture was there a random voiceover appearing partway through to announce "This is Eric. He's about to tell us how a bunch of MMA mavericks took on the whole boxing game."

This documentary is very much like an '80s video game. Getting invested in the story is nigh-impossible and the art is questionable. It has charming moments and ideas but not enough to be charming overall. Save your quarters. Hopefully the next one doesn't feel as out-of-date when they ship it.

Final Review Scores
In a word: Pernicious
In a sentence: Not enough Zhilei Zhang and Anthony Joshua.
In a number: 5.54
In an IGNorant emoji: 7️⃣
In a rom-com: Anyone But You

'Knockout Chaos' is available on شاهد and DAZN
Director/Producer: Tom Day (We Go Again Studios)
Production companies: Saudi General Entertainment Authority, Sela, BigTime Creative Shop, and We Go Again.
Runtime: 01:23:06

BONUS! - Petty nitpicks and pontifications

• As one of the people who called the fight wrong, I would like to publicly thank Joshua for standing up for boxing when I thought it was destined to receive a knockout blow.
• Ziyad 'Zizo' Almaayouf tells us he used to google Saudi Arabian boxers (back when there weren't any) and we get a recreation of that moment with a Google page showing 0 results. Minor detail but they used modern Google, complete with modern dark mode. Missed opportunity to show how the page looked all those years ago before the web was sleek and rounded.
• Oladipo brings up the AJ & Femi dichotomy, a Jekyll & Hyde situation that supposedly best describes Joshua's life inside and outside of boxing. It's one that's been spoken about more frequently since his losses.
• The poor level of commentary holds back these ending montages because during fights, every second or third comment is just "[a/good] [left/right] hand [upstairs/to the body/there] [by/from] [INSERT NAME]". There's nothing to glean from this and it adds little value.
  • In future they might benefit from referring to radio or international commentary so they have a large pool of sources to draw from. It's always nice when documentaries showcase languages from around the world, it really helps to sell the global nature of sports or any event.
• The actual Joshua-Ngannou fight lasted 5 minutes and 38 seconds, the recap here lasted around 4 minutes.
• I criticised the generic orchestral music of the last documentary. My wish for something different was monkey-pawed and this documentary leans heavily into synthwave.
  • I won't fault them for doing something nominally new, they just happened to land on one of my least favourite genres. Chiptune would've been the infinitely better choice for fitting the game theme.
• The language used to describe Joshua and Ngannou ranges from 'specimens' to 'monsters', it really straddles the line between super-humanising and de-humanising. Other sports tend to discourage this sort of talk with good reason.
• Turki AlAlshikh's private collection of boxing memorabilia looks impressive from the few appearances it makes. Could it one day be the basis for a hypothetical Riyadh International Boxing Museum?
• Drawing a blank for the last time I watched a film where the song over the credits ends but then the rest of the credits continue in silence.
• The drawings are the opposite of good. In my review of that Jack Johson comic I said that "a few of the drawings feel like caricatures that you could precede with a not very nice adjective" and I feel the same way about the drawings here. Ngannou is also drawn with suspect accuracy but they took an especially "eh, close enough" attitude with Joshua if you're generous to the artist. You could make less generous comparisons as well.