The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker is a surface-level portrait of a mythical hero

A Netflix true-crime documentary has this rare ability to reframe a famous story as a new one. The trick is to make the viewers who’ve read about it before feel like they’re hearing it for the first time. It’s not easy, of course. It’s like packaging a product to look like an entirely different product. For instance, back in 2013, I remember coming across several news articles – and YouTube videos – of Kai, a homeless hatchet-wielding hitchhiker who rescued a woman during a racist hate crime. It was a cultural moment. The long-haired dude who spoke like a teenage mutant ninja turtle went viral, and I could only marvel at his instant rise to fame. The internet is a strange place, but we live for unlikely underdog stories – and Kai’s was one. But what I don’t remember is that Kai was charged for the brutal murder of a lawyer months later. Or at least Colette Camden’s 83-minute documentary attempts to convince me that I don’t remember this. After showing his dizzying ascent to stardom – fueled by the chew-and-spit culture of the American news cycle (a Fox anchor ‘discovered’ Kai after all) – the film taps into his dark past and, by extension, his unpredictable and violent nature. It then proceeds to poke holes in its own reading of viral star Kai, psychologically profiling the man who perhaps had a screw loose all along. The problem with this approach is that it’s inherently sensationalist; it builds up a narrative to mirror the real-time flow of events before questioning said narrative. This particular documentary is too obvious in its build-and-break pattern, too. It takes too long to establish Kai as a happy-go-lucky hero going through his 15 minutes of fame, especially because we know that a shock is around the corner. It then takes too long to introduce the other side of Kai, changing tone too self-consciously while playing out like an entirely different film. That’s the downside of this rare Netflix ability. Most documentaries are so committed to ‘revealing’ something to the viewer – or even pretend to be revealing things – that they tend to overplay the twist and mystery of it all. Everything is stretched and pressed on. In Kai’s case, there’s a lot of whataboutery: about his personality, about his unstable behavior and his taste for violence. The talking heads, who were only minutes ago talking him up, start to go: Hmm, come to think of it, he was a bit weird that day. An ex-researcher on Jimmy Kimmel Live starts to sound like a dad who lost control of his errant child. Ditto for the Fox anchor, the cameraman, a reality show executive – all of whom blindly propelled Kai into the limelight without really treating him as a real person. He was always a story to them, a story that they wanted to believe for their own good and success. The film pretends to examine Kai’s history to explain his erratic ways, but it makes the same mistake as the internet did. It handles him as fodder for the future, observing him from a distance and creating a surface-level picture at will. At points, it sounds like an all-knowing psychiatrist who is outing its patient for effect. The downfall seems inevitable, yet the film milks the wait for all its worth. At best, it’s doctor-obvious film-making. At worst, it’s condescending storytelling. As a result, the last thirty minutes of The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker are low on insight and high on curated suspense. Kai is reduced to a tragedy, and there’s not a single mention of how he’s also a victim of the fickleness of internet fame. A more empathetic documentary might have scratched beyond the surface and told his story – through his own eyes – from the beginning. Instead, Kai’s 2013 ‘rescue’ becomes a jump-in point for a story that just happens to throw some light on a potential sociopath. The camera often looks for a story, and when it finds one, it doesn’t care about the beginning and the end. But sometimes the story chances upon a camera, only to be hurled into the oblivion of celebrity culture. Kai Lawrence is the latter, but this documentary views him as the former. He may have been a viral hit in 2013, but ten years later, Netflix is recycling him to become its own viral hit. Rahul Desai is a film critic and programmer, who spends his spare time travelling to all the places from the movies he writes about. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.