SEAN COMBS: THE RECKONING (2025)

Here's yet another Netflix documentary with four parts that should have been two, as there's simply too much time spent on interviews with particular people suing Sean Combs... Each episode has at least one or two people being interviewed about a lawsuit and what led up to the lawsuit...

The problem is, these long stretches of repetitive allegations simply gets in the way of an otherwise intriguing documentary about the rise of a supposed music icon who's definitely a music mogul... It's one thing to have a frame story that, in this case, is self-shot footage of Combs in the nervous days leading up to his arrest: But there are multiple frames here and there needed only that one...

The most interesting episode is the third, after piggybacking on what seems more a Suge Knight/Tupac biopic... when Puffy rises as a contrived phoenix from the ashes of his biggest act, Notorious BIG, meets Cassie Ventura, and begins a downward drug-fueled spiral... But then we're tortured with twenty-minutes of more allegations... from a male "sex worker" (who's not very attractive) saying (without proof) that he slept with Cassie AND Diddy, which segues into a studio musician in the final episode accusing him of rape... All these bulwarks might be important on paper since the court case is the elephant in the room, but they simply ruin the overall flow here as a documentary with way too many cooks and conspiracies. Grade: C—