Der axtschwingende Anhalter

Having never heard of Kai before this documentary, I was really interested in hearing his story. Through interviews with news reporters and television producers, we get a picture painted of a young homeless man with a hippie-esque mentality who became a hero through seemingly justified violence. But as Kai's story progresses, we come to see that he is a more unbalanced and unpredictable person than was originally thought. When police and family are interviewed, we truly begin to see behind the veil of Kai's homeless hippie hero persona.

While this documentary starts off well with lengthy, balanced coverage of Kai's rise to fame vis social media, it falls flat when addressing the crime he is currently imprisoned for. The murder of Joseph Galfy almost seems like an afterthought compared to the build up of Kai's meteoric rise through the majority of the film. Many documentaries covering crimes and convictions of this nature feature interviews with psychologists and legal specialists to better illustrate the antagonist's clinical mental state and history but little is done to showcase this, save for limited interviews with his mother and cousin.

While the story is interesting, this execution of this documentary fails to give a fully balanced look at the entirety of Kai's rise and fall, leaving you saying "Wait, that's the end?".

So this is a much ado about nothing situation. All this people who are trying to make a buck off of this neuro-atypical kid are disgusting. Of course they pretend to be looking out for him and to want to make him rich, but they could not care less about his well being. They just want to ride the wave of his viral moment. That is not a surprise. In fact nothing is a surprise in this doc, and all the moments that are presented as cliffhangers and mindblowing events are so predictable and ultimately uninteresting, because from the point of view of the ugly people trying to exploit him. If it had been a doc about him, his mental health, the relationship between that and his life choices, or the absence of such relationship, it would have been a much better doc. But the bottom line for this is "we could have made so much money out of him, but he is troubled for real, not just to entertain us."

A decent and engaging documentary about a truly bizarre story. This one ties in viral videos and media sensationalism as Kai, the axe wielding hitchhiker turns from hero and media sweetheart to something very, very different. It is a real reminder to us that what we see on social media and instagram is a polaroid photo of someone's lie, not their life. Kai became a sensation for using his axe to save a victim of road rage and talking to the news in his candid self. As exposure to him increases there is more revealed about his nature-perhaps the nature that lead to him being homeless in the first place as a musically talented, funny hero. When someone talks in streams of consciousness are they brilliant or insane? I often complain that Netflix takes a good documentary story and drags it into 2 or 3 parts unnecessarily, but this one is tightly contained to 1 episode and that is a plus.

On the surface, this doc charts the viral popularity of Kai, but really it's about the insidious, predatory nature of parasites who deliberately ignored his VERY obvious mental illness to exploit him for their own gain. The warning signs were there from the minute the cameras started rolling - this is a deeply unwell young man who seems unable to parse reality from delusion, and his story inevitably ends in violence. But hey, he gets clicks so the Kardashian producers want to give him a reality TV show. He looks uncomfortable, like a caged animal in a zoo, but I want a selfie to show my friends. Most of the interviews are industry people detailing the various ways they tried to profit off of him while ignoring glaringly obvious red flags, with few if any showing remorse or even self-awareness. This doc also borders on exploitative, but it has value as a satire of our celebrity-obsessed culture and flippant attitude towards mental illness. I'm just not sure that was the goal.

This documentary is heartbreaking and deeply disturbing to watch, but certainly not in the ways that it was intended to be. It was clear from the get-go that Kai was delusional and needed psychological help. Instead, the media sharks descended upon him and took advantage of him because they thought they could make money off of him.

What if they had looked at him as a human being with a horrendous childhood who was desperately in need of help, instead of only seeing him as their next cash cow? Would things have ended differently? They had an opportunity to really make a difference in this kid's life and they squandered it.

This isn't an indictment of Kai so much as it is an indictment of the bloodthirsty media who exploited him. And this documentary doesn't even have the self awareness to see that. Shame on every single person who chose to ignore the warning signs because they were so focused on the dollar signs! Disgusting!