Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off

Tony Hawk started skating as a child and resembled nobody. He won contests but the skating world did not like him; his tricks were found too technical and his style was not admired. At the start of the nineties the skate industry collapsed. Hawk had no money; he sold his house and worked ordinary jobs for a while. Then the industry came back. At one contest he tried something nobody had landed before, and landed it. Then a video game came out and skating was never the same. The documentary looks at the present; the man is in his fifties and still falling. Sam Jones directs. Tony Hawk, Stacy Peralta, Rodney Mullen and Mike McGill speak in it. It is an American production. The documentary works with a wide archive; a great deal of amateur footage from the eighties and nineties is used. The matter it treats is being unable to stop; the film describes not a sporting career but a compulsion. The documentary does not show Hawk only as a winner; how the skaters around him saw him is inside the narrative. It takes on his family and his divorces as well. The film shows the injuries in detail and does not hide the physical cost. The narrative also describes the effect of the game; skating entered the mainstream that way. Its limit is length; the narrative runs past two hours and the middle sags. Who it is for: viewers who like sports documentary and skate culture. Who it is not for: it is long, the subject narrow, and the ending sentimental.