God damn it, OJ. Haven’t you taken up enough of America’s time? The only reason I watched all 7 hours and 47 minutes of this is because it was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary film. Which is BS. THIS IS NOT A FILM. I don’t care that ESPN had special screenings at theaters and ran it all the way through to meet Oscar qualifications. It’s a documentary mini-series; if you want to actually evaluate it as a film, then the first thing I’d say is that it is painfully ridiculously long and belabors each point to death. (It’s worth noting that I did watch it in its “intended” format, straight through all nearly 8 hours.) I can be much more fair if I look at it for what it actually is: a mini-series. It’s still too long. This work is really about sociological issues in America: racism, football, cult of celebrity, the death of critical thinking, and it uses OJ Simpson as a vehicle to deliver its points, but if Ava Duvernay can deliver a similar criticism in 100 minutes with 13th and Raoul Peck can do it in 95 with I Am Not Your Negro, what excuse does Ezra Edelman have? The piece makes some interesting points, OJ Simpson never cared about being black until he needed to be black. The black community, so fed up with injustice and oppression, rallied behind the worst figure imaginable to carry their cause, and America will brutalize and exploit any person for a little bit of entertainment. Ultimately, the piece becomes the rawest excoriation of American society imaginable. I walked away from the piece not only firmly convinced that we were doomed, but that the summer of the OJ trial in America will be the point at which historians mark the beginning of the fall of America. Absolutely everyone in this film suffers, is tried for crimes they didn’t commit, and is exonerated for crimes that they did. Ultimately the film becomes everything that it sets out to expose, by using OJ to make these points, it plays on all of our worst attributes as a society to get us to watch. If you don’t walk away from this film nauseated by the gruesomeness of it and thinking we all played an accessory role in this American demise, I suspect you may be closer to the accomplices than you imagine.