aka Charlie Sheen Review

Unlike most, I grew up watching Two and a Half Men during my teenage years. I have no idea why, as virtually everyone else in the UK was watching the likes of Friends or The Office, but for me, I spent most of my time watching Charlie Harper and his brother Alan get up to ridiculous antics from their Malibu beach house. The show marked Charlie Sheen’s major return to the public eye after a stint in rehab in the late 1990s. However, after a couple of years of major success with the show, Sheen was fired in 2011 due to a variety of problems. After that, the world didn’t see much of Charlie apart from in the occasional negative press story or in the 2017 ensemble film 9/11.

Aka Charlie Sheen, a new two-part documentary now on Netflix, is an attempt by Sheen to tell his story. He’s now several years sober and has clearly been given the platform to try to get some positivity on the public perception of him. It doesn’t go too heavily into the major controversies from his career, but it still offers a more raw, honest Sheen than we’ve seen for many years. Interestingly, a lot of major people in his life appear in the documentary, from Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller, his ex-wives, all the way through to Chuck Lorre and Jon Cryer, with whom he famously fell out with after being fired from Two and a Half Men. However, noticeably, his father, Martin Sheen, and brother Emilio Estevez don’t appear.

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I wasn’t sure what I expected when I started watching the documentary. I guessed that it would be self-fulfilling to some degree, and deep down, I knew that it was unlikely to get too heavy, but in the end, I was pleasantly surprised by just how open the contributors were, especially Charlie Sheen himself. It’s a long watch with both episodes being around an hour and a half, but director Andrew Renzi does do a really good job of telling Sheen’s story, and that story is genuinely quite an emotional rollercoaster. It’s incredibly interesting with lots of various wacky stories throughout (such as Sheen driving a passenger jet drunk in ’95 or Sheen almost being the Karate Kid), but the overwhelming feeling I felt watching was how lucky Sheen has been to get through the last twenty or so years. 

In the end, the documentary offers viewers an honest look at the events that define his story, looking past the obvious headlines to explore the impact of fame and success. It’s clear from the documentary that lots of the contributors still have lots of love for him, and Sheen expresses remorse throughout, but unfortunately, I’m not sure it does enough to magic away a lot of his crazy moments. It does, however, show a man who is hopefully on a better path forward.

★★★

Now streaming on Netflix / Charlie Sheen, Jon Cryer, Chuck Lorre, Sean Penn, Denise Richards, Chris Tucker / Dir: Andrew Renzi / Netflix