Sorry, this movie sucks

Just perfect...

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

I liked the movie, it showed some interesting perspectives, but one fact bugged me more than anything else; the sheer number of different NFL team hats he wears. I know he wears a Colts, Saints, Chargers, Steelers and Raiders hat, and I think I am forgetting a few. This is the most troubling part of the film for me, as the credibility of someone who endorses multiple teams (within the same division no less) is far from stellar. I need someone with more time on their hands to get to the bottom of this mystery and let the world know who this cat really roots for. This is so completely irrelevant that I have to hope it was an inside joke or easter egg kind of deal, but i find it ridiculous.

A challenging, very interesting documentary that is both personal and about societal issues. Chris Bell and his two brothers have all used steroids to help build their bodies. Chris has stopped, but his brothers have continued. This ambitious documentary takes on two issues at once, tying them together at the end. (Although this construction does make for some muddy patches in the middle, where the film's POV becomes a bit unclear.) First, the movie is a rejoinder to the knee jerk anti-steroid movement that (Bell argues pretty convincingly) has demonized a substance that is a lot less dangerous than we've been led to believe and certainly less so than alcohol, cigarettes, or sky-diving, all of which are legal, if dangerous personal choices. Bell points out the hypocrisy that we allow all sorts of other 'performance enhancing' but dangerous practices – like Air Force pilots being allowed to take Dexedrine to keep going, or models staving themselves. At the same time we sense Bell's ambivalence about the drug and his brothers' continued use of it. And ultimately we come to understand why. Bell is questioning the bigger issue of an America that says if you aren't the biggest, the strongest, the smartest, the richest, the most beautiful, you're somehow deficient. A country that has such scorn for athletes doing whatever it takes to win, also creates a 'do whatever it takes to win' mentality in life. How much we wink at airbrushed photos of models, politicians who lie and make up facts, people who use plastic surgery to look young and beautiful, etc. These are important issues, and by dealing with how they personally they effected himself and his family, Bell manages to avoid coming off preachy or holier than thou. He's just trying to make sense of the mixed messages we've ail grown up with' "Play fair" but "America loves a winner and hates a loser".

I am a basketball player of athletic built (work outs in the gym for 2 years now) and I personally am against the use of performance enhancing drugs or anabolic steroids (in sports).I was pretty mixed up after finishing this movie because I was never really sure if it was deliberate to weaken both the shown pro and anti steroid arguments, or if the movie simply sucks. Third possibility, the director and writers give an insight of how weird the mind processing of a (ex-)steroid user is.The reason why I ask myself this is because never ever a clear position on steroids in sports or in general seems to be taken and every time we have a point we are quickly served a counter argument.So now what? Let everybody do what he thinks is right? Can we blame America's competitive society for the popularity of steroids among gym rats? Seriously? On the pro-steroid side, we are presented with a lot of (mislead but also some successful) steroid takers who all seem like they don't get their mindset right, but on the anti-steroid side we have a politician heavily involved in the fight of steroids who has no clue what he's talking about.Does this mean that both sides are lead by unknowing amateurs that APPEAR to be great (bulky on one side, politician on the other) but that in REALITY they both pretty much lost track of who they are and what they initially wanted to achieve? Maybe so, that's at least what I thought, which would make the director great.Why else would he let steroid users say that since everybody takes 'em, they want to they 'em too, to stay competitive. Are we to choose a position on that? Is the movie provoking us to decide first for ourselves whether the use of steroids is bad and then for others? After all, many points in the movie go that direction to let everybody decide for himself what he thinks about steroids.For instance, we have the director explain to us that steroids are banned, illegal, ill received but that everybody condemning it did either take them (Governor Schwarzenegger) or support their use (in Sports, like ex-President G.W. Bush).To prove a point, he creates his own supplement, deliberately showing off that most of the stuff must be total sh**. Same thing with the photo-shopping of ads.The main supporters are supposed to be the fans that love and want more performance from their favorite athletes. So some are accused to play blind and others want it to be in order to ignore that, while we officially don't like cheating in sports, we, secretly, want it.Is the use of steroids then simply the result of what happens if your inner dirt bag takes over? Then that is does not pay off, because 99.99% of the steroid addicted gym rats achieve NOTHING in life but side effects? Talking about side effects, Mikes wife claims to not witness any on her husband, but she could by lying.Just as Barry Bonds says "You all lied". We all somewhere did. Maybe we should clean our closets first but truth be told, the no closet will ever get cleaned, they will all get dirtier.So here we are: steroids are bad, they are cheats, but then again they do not replace talent, there are other more dangerous drugs, then some side effects are reversible, some are not (those remain of course unmentioned in this movie) etc. etc, We could go on with that mindset and go nowhere, but I dare to find one point in this whole movie: Everybody has dirt on his hands but prefers to wash someone else's first while hiding theirs behind their back.There is also a letdown in this movie. That there IS a way to look like your role model or to at least feel to have achieved something great like your sports role model: work hard and earn it with honest effort. Unlike Johnson's stripped gold medal, that hard earned silver medal makes you an honest smiler.And happy with no negative side effects.

This is an honest, entertaining, and informative documentary. The man who is making this documentary about steroid use isn't someone just talking about it. You can tell he is emotionally involved in this. This is due to both his brothers taking steroids. That is a big part of the documentary. He isn't a guy interviewing someone he doesn't even know. He is talking to his brothers, and that makes this documentary much more than a documentary. It is also very entertaining. Documentaries are not made to be entertaining. They are made to be informative, but this documentary manages to keep you entertained as well as informed. That leads us to the information. They give solid facts in this movie. This does really show how publicity for steroids as gone overboard. People all the time say that steroids kill thousands of people, but this shows a solid number of 3 people confirmed dead from steroids a year. This really is one of the best documentaries I've ever watched. It is very underrated.4 stars out of 4