The Irish fighter Conor McGregor is credited as an executive producer on this documentary about his rise from out-of-work Dublin plumber to mixed martial arts superstar. That’ll explain the Vanity Fair magazine levels of fawning and fluffery: the only prodding here is of the fist-jabbing variety. Which is a shame, because McGregor comes across as immensely charismatic, an outsized presence; if you were making a biopic of his life, Tom Hardy would be the top of the casting list.
Cleverly framing his subject as a sporting underdog, director Gavin Fitzgerald shows us before-he-was-famous footage of McGregor living at his mum’s (“I haven’t got a pot to piss in”), which makes the fly-on-the-wall insights into his blingtastic private jets ’n’ mansions lifestyle a little less obnoxious. A peacock in bespoke suits, his beard oiled to male-model perfection, McGregor’s physical prowess is matched only by his outrageous talent for self-promotion (he has his own name tattooed across his chest). He’s never less that watchable, but the film is disappointingly one-sided, and there is something fake about its claims to intimacy. It also pulls its punches – stopping just short of the biggest fight of McGregor’s career, that defeat to Floyd Mayweather in summer.
