In Search of Doc Holliday

Although the script read by the narrator seems to be accurate and Holliday's story is certainly interesting, the visual material is done so poorly you'd be far better served by reading one of the many excellent books on Doc. The film repeatedly uses the same photographs and video clips throughout, and they often have no correlation to the subject being discussed. For example, several scenic views of saguaro-studded hills are shown when the narrator is covering Doc's days in Colorado, New Mexico, or Tombstone. However, there aren't saguaros in Colorado, New Mexico, or Tombstone. Knowing this, I couldn't trust that any of the landscape photos shown were actually of the places being discussed (unless I happened to be personally familiar with those places). The narrator routinely mispronounces proper names, such as Prescott, the town in Arizona, which he stresses as press-CAHT. The authors interviewed served the film well and provided useful information, but deserved a better production. When brief dramatizations were included, they added nothing, and the hats weren't even accurate for Doc's years (and, like the saguaro photos and the random babbling water videos, they were repeated again and again). The film misses the mark.

Tombstone is one of my favorite movies, so I was curious to watch this documentary. The info was interesting and I'm sure it was a lot of work to gather it all..... BUT, the quality is really bad. It reminds me of a high school production, with poor editing, awful segues and a narrator that is apparently bored out of his mind. All in all, it's worth an hour or so if you have a slow Saturday night and you're a Tombstone fan.

I wanted to know more about Doc Holliday but this documentary presents information as if it were written for a sixth grade homework assignment, main points of his life connected with long commentary and short on details. We hear a lot that Doc was a rascal, probably a murderer, that people didn't like him but those same people spent a lot of time with him and would rush to his aid when needed. Doc Holliday is one of the most famous characters of the old west and yet details about what made him a legend are scant. At one point they say he travelled and witness history and became part of history -- why? Put me in the old west, why was Holliday different than any of the other rough men that settled disputes with a gun? The narrator is monotone and his delivery has all the enthusiasm of Ben Stine reading his own obituary, he lulled me to sleep during the OK Corral segment which should have been the most exciting part. There is no reason to watch this documentary unless you have insomnia.

My goodness, talk about ignorance, this "documentary" is loaded with historical inaccuracies. It particularly glosses over slavery and reconstruction in a manner that is absolutely shameful. To quote the film, "...to oversee the redistribution of land as the former plantations were broken up, and the former slaves were made land owning Tennant farmers." This is an absolute impossibility, one cannot be both a landowner and a tenant farmer, it's literally a logical impossibility. Beyond that, redistribution of land never happened, except on small scale on the coast of Georgia and it was undone by federal mandate.

This documentary had some good information but good lord the narration was brutal. Did they just do one take? Is the guy not capable of reading aloud? It felt like an inter-dimensional cable episode of rick and morty... like he was winging it, or drunk.