In April 2000, about a year before World Championship Wrestling (WCW) was bought out by rival World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) from Vince McMahon, wrestling fans of the time were given a tile on the head when Eric Bishoff, the brain of the late WCW, decided to offer an actor the prestigious world championship of his federation once worn by legends like Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes before.
This actor was David Arquette during the promotional tour of the film Ready to Rumble.
A controversial championship
At the time, Arquette had been received very negatively by WCW supporters and his involvement cast a shadow over a discipline in perpetual quest for credibility with the mainstream media. Even before learning to tie wrestling boots, Arquette was proclaimed king of the mountains. To stay in the alpine analogy, it is as if he had touched the summit of Everest before having climbed Mount Royal on foot.
Normal to get lost and, above all, to leave a few feathers in the process.
David Arquette, if you are less familiar with his career, had a rocket in his back in the mid-90s when he was, alongside his contemporaries like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey, on the doorstep of a great Hollywood career. But his choice to play the role of Dewey Riley in the Scream of Wes Craven was going to affix a comic label to him which he will struggle to undo all his life. While his counterparts were crumbling under offers with more serious and meaningful roles, Arquette was going to lose himself in the doldrums of the sequels of the franchise of the father of Freddy Krueger in addition to getting tripped up in projects like Ready to Rumble or even the laughable Eight Legged Freaks which is still, twenty years later, the round of viewing evenings for the wrong reasons among moviegoers.
It is this version of David Arquette who owned the world championship of the second largest wrestling federation in the United States at the time. It is also on a road paved with pitfalls that the actor will lose the north of his career on multiple occasions thereafter, not to mention his personal problems related to consumption.
Without saying that his coronation in WCW was going to cast a bad spell on the rest of his life, it’s hard not to see at least a bad omen with the step of hindsight offered by time.
The fight of a lifetime by David Arquette
Twenty years after this first leap into the world of wrestling, it is a David Arquette reasoned by humility who presents us a documentary on his resurrection in a certain way: You Cannot Kill David Arquette.
Directed by David Darg and Price James, the film will be presented as a Canadian premiere during the digital edition of the Montreal Fantasia Festival on August 24. We find David Arquette there before a turning point in his life triggered by a heart attack from which he keeps two coronary guardians. After coming close to death at 46, the father of three revisited his past and, above all, his buried passion for the fight to find the north.
Also, as we learn in the documentary, he wanted to find a form of respect that had never been accessible to him at the time when he was parachuted into a world in which he was not welcome. and in which he had not studied.
This is the premise of the film about the second life of David Arquette and this is where some explanation is in order.
Discern right from wrong
Classing, for a wrestler, is starting at the bottom of the ladder and learning from the veterans. It is receiving blows, a lot of blows, and accumulating injuries that are inevitable when learning the basics of entertainment at real risks despite the predetermined results. Classing also means respecting the diegetic codes of the discipline – that is, the way of telling stories inside the ring and, also, between fights outside of it.
You Cannot Kill David Arquette is a documentary about the man, the actor, the father and the wrestler, but it is also a piece of the puzzle in the great fictional story of the return to the ring of the former world champion twenty years after its debut.
It’s crystal clear from the first frames of the film when Ken Anderson, a veteran on independent circuits and former WWE, talks about an opponent he will meet in the ring at a Wrestling Legends Gala presented at the end of the movie. This loop in the documentary’s narration is also a thinly veiled way of admitting to ourselves that we should not believe everything we see on screen, especially when we know that wrestlers are difficult narrators. reliable since they constantly lie.
It is not necessarily a fault to bend the cinematographic medium to the demands of the kayfabe; the addition of codes and unspoken that wrestlers maintain so as not to reveal the tricks of their profession. But it’s a bit of a shame to stay on an unanswered question during the whole viewing: did David Arquette really want to get back into the fight and earn the respect of his peers, or did he just want to make a good documentary film out of which he could propel his career towards other roles.
I tend to lean towards the second option because of the presence of cameras during the big stages of his comeback and, above all, ten years after the grandiose return of Mickey Rourke since his participation in Darren Aronofsky’s film The Wrestler in 2008.
That said, David Arquette’s motivations do not detract from the project and the commendable efforts he put into his apprenticeship. He dated legends like Diamond Dallas Page, he wrestled under a mask in Mexico long enough to be fit for a fight from start to finish and, being afraid of nothing, he even rubbed shoulders with it. ruthless Nick Mondo in a Death Match particularly bloody during which he had his throat slit with fragments of neon lights used during the fight.
It made the rounds of the media in 2018 and, now that the film is completed, we understand better why Arquette was in the ring at the time.
Actor David Arquette discovers brutality in extreme wrestling match, seriously injures himself
You Cannot Kill David Arquette offers us a beautiful foray into the world of wrestling on the surface, but above all a beautiful exploration in the mind of an unknown actor of his generation who found, in his youthful passion, a way to mend his career and regain the esteem of an audience increasingly thin in front of his projects.
The road is fascinating and the result, predetermined as in the fight, does not detract from the perilous adventure of the former young first of the silver screen. We warmly recommend viewing, even if wrestling enthusiasts will see the ropes of the business from the first images.
The fact remains that it is pleasant to offer an attentive ear to someone who understood, long afterwards, that he had unwittingly laughed at the passion of several people by becoming the king of ‘a mountain he was not to be on.
For its 2020 edition, the Fantasia Festival turns to digital broadcasting with a rich and varied program available from all over the province.
Monday August 24, at 7:30 p.m., you can watch the documentary You Cannot Kill David Arquette live on the festival platform. A question period will follow at 9:00 p.m. with the actor as well as the filmmaking team.
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