‘This isn’t going to be a film about intercourse and violence,” says John McAfee within the introduction to this documentary. Boo! “Although there could also be some in it.” Hooray! The extremely quotable antihero provides: “It’s James Bond meets Scarface, with a bit of Indiana Jones.” Cross the popcorn and depend us in.
The newest TV present from Netflix’s seemingly infinite true-crime conveyor belt is Working With the Satan: The Wild World of John McAfee. It tells the beggaring-belief story of the Silicon Valley golden boy who fled from homicide expenses and ran for US president. McAfee himself asks: “Am I a profitable entrepreneur who went mad and murdered his neighbour? Or the potential saviour of America?” Throughout this outrageous movie’s 105-minute operating time, you’ll in all probability lean in direction of the previous. That is Tiger King: Tech Tycoon Version.
Born, slightly incongruously, within the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, McAfee moved to the US, graduated in arithmetic and have become a programmer at Nasa, engaged on the Apollo house missions. In 1987, he invented McAfee antivirus, one of the profitable – to not point out most hated – items of software program ever. At his peak, McAfee had a private fortune of $100m. The corporate that bears his title is value $14bn at present.
In 1994, the maverick mogul stop his enterprise to take up yoga and meditation, shifting to the rich vacationer enclave of Ambergris Caye in Belize. The proprietor of the mansion subsequent door was 52-year-old Florida expat Gregory Faull, whose pet parrot was completely perched on his shoulder (as a result of God forbid anybody on this story must be remotely regular). He had an issue with McAfee’s canines. When the beloved mutts have been poisoned, McAfee was heard vowing to kill Faull as retribution. Two days later, Faull was shot behind the top. McAfee was the prime suspect however by the point native police raided his compound, he was gone.
This weird yarn begins in earnest in 2012, when McAfee invitations Vice journal’s editor in chief Rocco Castoro and cameraman Robert King (an endearingly grizzled character, paying homage to The Dude from The Massive Lebowski) to doc his life in hiding. They comply with him from Belize to Guatemala, accompanied by his ex-military bodyguards and far youthful girlfriend Sam (she was 18 once they met, 46 years his junior). We see McAfee making an attempt to bribe customs officers, swigging whisky from the bottle and firing weapons for enjoyable. “I hate to advocate alcohol, medication, violence and madness to anyone,” he deadpans. “Nevertheless it’s all the time labored for me.”
The Vice guys appear intoxicated by him, too. They publish an internet article with the headline: “We’re with John McAfee proper now, suckers.” Sarcastically, they overlook to take the geo-data off the accompanying {photograph}, freely giving the IT safety guru’s location. Cue him happening the run once more. “Clearly I’m a flight threat,” McAfee chuckles within the getaway automobile. “I specialize in flighting.”
When issues go pear-shaped, he fakes a coronary heart assault to get himself airlifted again to the US, ditching poor Sam on the border. Inside hours of touchdown in Miami, he has connected with intercourse employee Janice, who he quickly marries. Requested if it was love at first sight, she laughs: “Fuck no … I simply noticed a chance.”
The narrative turns into as chaotic as the person himself. McAfee repeatedly goes into hiding, then re-emerges and invitations the digital camera crew again. These near him admit he’s a grasp manipulator and narcissist. He compares himself to The Joker and relishes being a wished man. On his still-active Twitter web page, McAfee’s bio reads: “Iconoclast. Lover of girls, journey and thriller.”
One of many sweetest scenes sees the wannabe master-of-disguise go to a small city wig retailer to get fitted with a Michael Fabricant-style hairpiece. The store assistant can’t imagine her luck when he out of the blue affords $500 money for her low cost sun shades. A lot much less charmingly, McAfee additionally fakes incapacity to evade detection.
McAfee darkly claims to have “hacked the world”, hinting that he has bugged governments worldwide, together with the White Home. He insists Belize authorities carried out a witch-hunt as a result of he had proof of corruption, that politicians need him silenced and that Mexico’s highly effective Sinaloa drug cartel have a contract out on him.
King says this was in all probability paranoid, self-aggrandising nonsense. The intel that McAfee claimed to own has by no means been launched. In 2016 and 2020, he ran for US president on a libertarian ticket, boasting that he would by no means pay taxes once more and sporting his arrest warrant as a badge of honour. He didn’t safe a nomination each occasions.
All of it goes a bit Hunter S Thompson when he buys a yacht from Jordan Belfort, AKA the Wolf of Wall Road, and units sail for the Bahamas with a cargo of medication, exhausting liquor and heavy weaponry. Psychosis takes maintain. In the course of the Atlantic, McAfee threatens to shoot King “within the dick”. Regardless of a long time as a warfare photographer, King understandably quits – however he’s quickly lured again to proceed the story.
The Vice documentary was by no means launched however in 2019, British director Charlie Russell approached McAfee a couple of potential follow-up. “It is a man who lived his life like he was the protagonist of a film,” says Russell. “He’s clearly making an attempt to regulate his personal narrative – however how a lot anybody can try this over a interval of years, not to mention a person in his 70s who drinks closely and advocates the usage of mind-altering substances. I’m undecided.”
Russell – whose Bafta-winning CV contains acclaimed movies about Terry Pratchett, Caroline Flack and Chris Packham – sifted via a whole lot of hours of unseen footage. He skilfully makes use of Castoro and King’s uncooked materials, supplemented by new interviews, to construct a portrait of McAfee’s dissolute life and dramatic downfall.
“John got here up with an elaborate plan to permit us to interview him,” says Russell. “We might fly to a European airport and be met by his safety workforce, who would take away our telephones, put baggage over our heads and drive us round for 5 hours so we’d don’t know of John’s location. I later found that this form of behaviour was fairly commonplace for John. He preferred to always take a look at these round him. We didn’t get the possibility to find whether or not the hazard was actual or not. By the point we have been ready to journey post-pandemic, John had been picked up by the authorities.”
After the escape artist’s arrest within the Dominican Republic in 2019, issues take a darker flip. By the top of the documentary, large questions encompass McAfee’s story, and Faull’s homicide stays unsolved. This tragedy hangs over your entire movie, stopping it from changing into a larger-than-life lark. One other darkish twist comes when ghostwriter Alex Cody Foster discovers that in his troubled teenagers, McAfee may need shot his abusive father and made it seem like suicide. “John was the virus,” concludes Foster. No matter McAfee’s reality, this fever dream of a documentary definitely will get below your pores and skin.
Supply hyperlink
