- Network: HBO Max
- Series Premiere Date: Oct 14, 2021
Critic Reviews
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
The heavy-handed hints about murder and poisoning lead nowhere; Monjack, the film seems to conclude, simply helped create the conditions that allowed Murphy to get so sick she really did die of pneumonia.
-
As is, What’s Happening, Brittany Murphy? feels like an episode of Inside Edition smoothed out to become a prestige mini-binge. The line between vindicating an unfairly maligned person and continuing to posthumously exploit her has rarely been so thin.
-
Murphy was exploited by the person she trusted the most: her husband. And the documentary is often guilty of exploitation as well.
-
What Happened, Brittany Murphy? uses the visual language of schlock television — the gauzy reenactments, jittery editing and heightened score — to produce … two hours of schlock television, more Hard Copy or Inside Edition than an interrogation of the aesthetics and ideology that let those outlets thrive.
-
What Happened, Brittany Murphy? is an incoherent, half-baked excuse for a documentary that chooses to disrespect and exploit its late subject rather than paying any tribute whatsoever to her memory.
-
“What Happened” settles for the bleakest and dullest of Hollywood cliché, ending in a place that degrades Murphy’s memory while pretending to honor it. ... Director Cynthia Hill has nowhere near the control of tone or the insight about her subject to make it feel like anything other than, well, gawking at an autopsy.
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 2 out of 4
-
Mixed: 1 out of 4
-
Negative: 1 out of 4
-
Oct 18, 2021This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
-
Oct 15, 2021