Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist Is Peacock's New Hit, but Is It Really Worth Watching?
You might want to pick another crime show to spend the evening with.
Not everyone can adapt podcasts into good movies or TV shows. Hulu 's Only Murders in The Building does it best: podcasts are a key part of the characters' world, their occupation, and the core of the unfolding events.
Peacock 's new project, Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist is based on the iHeartMedia studio's true crime of the same name. Due to its lack of focus and extended running time, the adaptation commits the worst possible crime – it fails to hold the audience's attention and motivate them to continue watching.
What Is Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist About?
The events of the eight-episode series take place in Atlanta in 1970. Legendary boxer Muhammad Ali has been out of the ring for several years due to his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War.
In honor of Ali's return, businessman Gordon Williams, nicknamed Chicken Man, decides to throw a lavish party. Suddenly, robbers interrupt the celebration, and all suspicion of organizing the robbery falls on Chicken.
Fate gives Ali an unpleasant surprise: the morning after the fight, all the Atlanta newspapers write not about his return, but about a criminal robbery.
Real Facts Turn Out to Be More Thrilling than the Story on the Screen
All the facts can be read on the Internet, so we can only hope for a worthy dramatization of the events that took place – but it does not happen. The show uses quick cuts inspired by 1970s aesthetics, split screens, and a brief disclaimer: the show's creators admit that they are deliberately changing the events for artistic purposes.
But even so, the screenwriter does not find anything exotic in the story of Chicken Man – he only admires the gangsters surrounding him, the widespread corruption and the easy money.
The series spends impressive amounts of money and time, attracts famous stars (from Kevin Hart to Samuel L. Jackson ), and loses every round miserably, wasting time on unnecessary characters and details of their biographies.
Once again, life proves more interesting than the art that imitates it. True crime fans will be disappointed by the lack of intrigue, while Muhammad Ali fans will be embarrassed to associate their idol with a project that treats him so disrespectfully. The Million Dollar Heist could have been a movie, but it turned out to be a schematic statement about human nature stretched out over eight hours.