Directed by David Darg and Price James
Featuring Courtney Cox, Lotsa Arquettes and Wrestlers
Running time: 1 hour and 31 Minutes
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some bloody images and nudity

by Ian Hrabe

There were few better times to be a wrestling fan than the late 90s. From 1996 to 2001, WWF and WCW were locked in a ratings battle to determine brand supremacy. Dubbed the Monday Night Wars, every Monday the two promotions would try to put on the more entertaining programming, and fans reaped the benefits of two wild and crazy (and at times deeply problematic) wrestling shows. WWF won the battle when Vince McMahon bought WCW from Ted Turner in 2001, and professional wrestling was never the same. Without competition, WWF grew stagnant and a lot of fans (present company included) lost interest. In recent years independent wrestling has taken off and drawn back in a lot of the kids who grew up during the Monday Night Wars era (present company included). This spawned a new rival promotion, All Elite Wrestling, which now airs on Wednesday nights opposite WWE’s NXT promotion. While it definitely doesn’t have the majesty of the Monday Night Wars, it’s nice to at least have alternatives to whatever backwards and kooky crap Vince McMahon wants to feed you. While it may seem like I just went into business for myself to turn Moviejawn into a wrestling zine (look out, The Atomic Elbow), You Cannot Kill David Arquette makes more sense with a little background because the inciting incident of this documentary is David Arquette “killing” the wrestling business and finding redemption 20 years after the fact. 

On April 26, 2000, David Arquette won the WCW championship on WCW’s Thursday night Thunder program. This is seen by a lot of folks as the modern wrestling era’s original sin, and among wrestling fans the decision to put a title with so much history on an actor to promote a movie (the 2000 Arquette/Scott Caan vehicle Ready to Rumble) was tantamount to treason. WCW was losing the ratings battle to WWF, who had Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Rock drawing viewers every week, and their programming turned increasingly goofy/awful (see also: The Buff Bagwell’s Mom on a pole match, the Fingerpoke of Doom, the end of Goldberg’s 173 match winning streak via stun gun, etc). Poor booking like that is how you end up with David Arquette holding the company’s top title. While wrestling fans are often depicted as mouthbreathing neckbeards, they’re not stupid, and they’ll turn on you if you feed them bullshit. 

David Arquette’s story of redemption begins in a wrestling world where he is regarded as a complete joke who is seen as someone who doesn’t respect the business or wrestling’s rich history. You Cannot Kill David Arquette is about Arquette earning the respect of the fans, the wrestlers, and the business as a whole, and he does so by committing to training and becoming an honest to god professional wrestler. The movie starts out pretty sad and silly, to a point where you can’t tell if this is a joke doc or not. Arquette is an alcoholic with anxiety issues who can’t get any acting work because he was typecast as a goofball in the Scream movies and no one will take him seriously. He has a supportive wife and a very sweet family. So he’s not hurting on that front, but he does seem rudderless. He flies to Detroit in an attempt to get on a Legends of Wrestling bill (i.e. one of those shows that wheels out the old wrasslin’ stars of yesteryear) and is sternly rebuffed. Arquette is portrayed so pathetically, it makes the film hard to get into at first. He goes to a signing with a bunch of other old wrestlers and no one goes to his table. He participates in a backyard wrestling match that is literally in someone’s backyard with maybe ten people in attendance and they have to stop the show to fix the ring when it collapses halfway through. Once it’s back up and running, Arquette is beaten to a pulp and powerbombed onto thumbtacks.

Though the goofy tone makes this a tough watch early on, when Arquette goes to Mexico to properly train with a group of luchadores, things start to pick up. It’s still very silly, and gives you I’m Still Here vibes, but once his training is complete you see him return to LA to get spray tanned (in a sequence that is equal parts hilarious and gross) and you see that he is now in fantastic physical shape. That’s when the idea that this is a big joke fades and the movie finds another gear. David has fully committed himself to wrestling. He has lost 50 pounds, quit drinking and smoking and is putting on legitimately good pro wrestling matches on the indie circuit. It’s here where you realize that you haven’t been watching a wacky story about a washed up actor trying to be a wrestler, but the story of a man working his ass off to earn the respect of a business he loves that wants nothing to do with him. During a hardcore deathmatch with Nick Gage, Arquette is cut in the neck with a busted light tube. He leaves the ring and you can see the terror on his face. He knows he needs to go to the hospital. You see him start to leave, and then he returns to the ring, goes after Gage and gives him some serious offense, takes the pin, and is sheparded to the ER. Wrestling may be scripted, but it’s not fake, and Arquette reminds you of that every ten minutes. 

You Cannot Kill David Arquette starts out so goofy that I had a sort of cinematic whiplash by the end where my heart was swelling with emotion for this guy totally redeeming himself. You can see it on the faces of the fans chanting for him at the Legends of Wrestling event at the films end, the same event he was turned away from the year before. You see how Arquette has harnessed the unique power pro wrestling has to captivate an audience, and you can see that he’s really damn good at it. If you told me David Arquette was going to be listed in the Pro Wrestling Illustrated Top 500 nearly 20 years after making a mockery of the business, I wouldn’t have believed you, but in 2019 David Arquette was ranked as the 453rd best wrestler in the business and honestly, that’s a bigger honor than any hollow championship.

Available to watch Friday, August 28.