Documentary corner: King of Kong

As this will be my last Documentary Corner feature of the year, I thought it fitting to end on a high note, with my favourite documentary of all time – King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It works in every way a documentary should, and then some. Director Seth Gordon was able to create a suspenseful, exciting, and completely engrossing film about one of the strangest and most niche topics imaginable – competitive Donkey Kong.

As I said in one of the older editions of documentary corner, a good documentary can take a topic you love and make it exciting and interesting, but a great documentary should be able to get the same reaction for a topic you know nothing about. King of Kong is about two men competing for the Donkey Kong world-record high score. Since it came out, a lot of people have taken to simply referring to it as ‘Billy vs Steve’ because of its two main characters – Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe.

The director has a lot of fun with classic Hollywood archetypes when showing us the two men: Mitchell is an icon in the world of arcade gaming, holding countless world records and has an ego to match. Wiebe is an outsider to this culture – an incredibly humble and likeable guy, who is intimidated and picked on by Mitchell and his goons at every turn as he tries to achieve the first truly extraordinary thing in his life. This underdog story really does boil down to a classic tale of good vs evil, and it’s handled perfectly.

There is bundles of style to be found here. A fine line is walked between silliness and seriousness, between drama, action, and comedy. The editing and style of filming also lends a great retro feel to each scene. The documentary is aware of the eccentricities of the topic and has fun with it – because of this, the audience is also able to have fun too.

Overall, however, it is the story that drives everything. At points one begins to question if Mitchell is even a real person: he’s so deliciously evil he even looks like a cheesy Hollywood villain – think Ben Stiller in Dodgeball. If it weren’t for the genuine sincerity of it all, one might mistake King of Kong as a mockumentary, but at the end of the day, despite some silliness, the story of Steve Wiebe is an inspiring one. Having such a genuine and easy-to-root-for protagonist cuts through a lot of the humour to give a touching heart to a truly unique and wonderful project. Originally, the film was supposed to be about retro gaming culture as a whole (we see a little bit of this with small features on other world champions like ‘Roy Awesome’), but the narrative Mitchell and Wiebe gave the producers was just too good to ignore. As such, the story unfolded throughout filming, and we get to experience the narrative progress just as the filmmakers did. And what a narrative it is.