One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stu Ungar

This is a travesty of a documentary. Just a kitchy whirlpool of flashes and contrasting images to tune up a story. Not the story of a man, but the story the makers wanted to tell. To fill in for their ill making the team gives fast inserts from other interviews, pictures, they even go that far to get some extras to play their stitched jigsaw puzzle. Everything to make this documentary parody stay together. And that is the only quality I can find in this work: that through trickery the team finds a way to keep things from falling over. I know this is Discovery Channel standard of documentary, yet this fits better in the category of B movie based on a real story.

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What we have here is maybe 10 minutes' worth of interesting video footage---Stu Unger at the poker table, reminiscences from world-class poker players and others who knew him---expanded into a 45-minute documentary through supposedly atmospheric dramatizations of Unger's life and soggy, stilted, clichéd narration. The result is repetitive, pretentious and completely unsatisfying.