MAN IN THE CAMO JACKET – Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

XLrator Media will be releasing the Mike Peters documentary MAN IN THE CAMO JACKET on VOD and iTunes on July 4th.

Mike Peters seems to be a kind, wonderful person, who helps inspire his fellow man. He should have gotten a better documentary than Man in the Camo Jacket. The film isn’t bad, it’s just there, with its incredible subject matter, and only that. The story of the rise of The Alarm is interesting and the story of Mike Peters fight against cancer is interesting, but the filmmaking behind it seems to be so trite and seen that it can’t help but lack a compelling bone in its body. The man at the center is great, the movie around him just isn’t.

The material here though has all of the hallmarks of an incredible story. A group of kids in a band rising to great success, the breakup of said band and the journey of one of the members through having cancer, sounds like a very good premise for any type of film, documentary or not, but as is said too many times, film is a visual medium and you can’t just have a good story, you need to create a cinematic work as well. Man in the Camo Jacket is suitably cinematic, pieced together from concert recordings and other materials, but it gives us just a clip show to watch. The man at the center, while also fascinating, doesn’t seem to be given anything more than a superficial profiling. There must be difficulty in shaping the portrait of a subject in any documentary, you try to explain who a person is to someone else, but beyond the now trite showcase of a man being simply a good man, there’s nothing else on the bones of the film here. Everything seems so gleeful, a move that while with no doubt expresses the man at the center of the film, can’t help but make everything seem manufactured.

This review was written with some difficulty because beyond the man at the center, there really isn’t a movie here. Mike Peters seems like the nicest guy, and his energy is infectious, but that’s just not enough to make Man in the Camo Jacket good.