Documentary Review: 'You Cannot Kill David Arquette' A Love Letter to Pro Wrestling

David Arquette loves professional wrestling. For the actor best known for his work in the Scream horror franchise, wrestling is not some surreal art project or a mere cry for attention. Arquette legitimately loves and respects the artistry, athleticism, showmanship and bravery that is required of those who put on trunks and play out pre-determined athletic scenarios for crowds of people who hang on every move the way some hang on every note of a classical symphony.

In the year 2000, David Arquette suffered what might be the ultimate example of the old adage: Be careful what you wish for. Starring in the pro wrestling comedy Ready to Rumble, David actually became embroiled in the world of professional wrestling. While promoting the movie, a co-production of Warner Brothers, a subsidiary of Time Warner, then the owners of their own wrestling company, WCW, Arquette's film promotion tour would include him climbing into a real wrestling with real professional wrestlers.

It was a dream come true that became an 18 year long nightmare. In an effort to promote the film, the creators of WCW decided to break one of the cardinal rules of professional wrestling, they broke 'kayfabe.' Kayfabe is carny slang for when you expose the ruse of a scam and allow the rubes to see how you are faking them. In allowing David Arquette to become the WCW wrestling champion, they'd exposed the artifice of wrestling in a way that was, to say the least, not well received.

Imagine, for a moment, if Danny Devito started beating up Arnold Schwarzenegger in the middle of a serious action movie. You simply would not believe it. Your suspension of disbelief would be destroyed. Pro wrestling, similarly to movies, or any other artform, relies on the audience buying into the artifice of what they are watching and giving themselves over to it. Break that spell and you ruin the magic.

David Arquette broke the spell of professional wrestling by becoming champion and the hardest part for him was, he never wanted to do it. As we see in the new documentary, You Cannot Kill David Arquette, he did not want to win the title. Arquette legitimately respected the suspension of disbelief and loved wrestling enough to know that he was perhaps breaking the spell and that this might not go over very well. He could not, however, be fully prepared for what came next.

For the next 18 years, David Arquette would lose his marriage to Courtney Cox, nearly lose his life to addiction and alcoholism, have a heart attack, and lose his once lucrative film career after his stint in wrestling caused many in Hollywood to decide he was too low rent for feature films. These years weren't all bad, he did fall in love and remarry and have another child and that has proved healthy. But, in the back of his mind, he's never forgotten the hurt of his brief moment in the world of wrestling.

Imagine being reviled in a world where you are desperate to be accepted. Maybe you want to be an author but other authors mock your work. Maybe your a musician and other musicians dismiss you for being too old or too strange. That sums up nearly two decades of David Arquette's life in the dual worlds of wrestling and acting, the two passions of his life. The WCW debacle made him a pariah in both wrestling and Hollywood circles, the only world's he'd ever wished to be part of. That sadness drives the action of You Cannot Kill David Arquette.

In 2018, David Arquette decided that the time was right to try and reclaim a legacy he never really had. On a cold day in Detroit, Michigan, apropos of no invitation, he showed up at the Legend of Wrestling event in hopes of being allowed to get in the ring and do what wrestlers call, an angle. Not in physical or emotional shape to actually go on, he gets into a fight with the shows promoter and ends up watching mournfully from the crowd.

Thus begins the bizarre and dangerous obsession that would consume the next year and a half of David Arquette's life. In his desperate quest to live down the reputation as the man who killed professional wrestling, David Arquette will go through the agony of wrestling training, wrestle in backyards with teenagers in front of no crowd and wrestle in the streets of Tijuana, just to prove he cares.

All the while, Arquette is dealing with recovering from a heart attack just a few years earlier. He has two stents in his chest that with the wrong amount of concussive pressure could be damaged. He has lingering injuries from a car accident several years ago. He's also quite emotionally off balance, suffering from severe anxiety and undergoing severe medical procedures, including a terrifying ketamine treatment, all so that he can do something that no one appears to actually want to see him do.

This bizarre, insatiable obsession is the heart of You Cannot Kill David Arquette. The documentary from directors David Darg and Price James places you deep inside the inner circle of David Arquette. The up close and personal, all access to Arquette is certainly not unprecedented in a documentary but it's incredibly important to this documentary as a sincere portrait of Arquette is required for us to understand and sympathize with his incredibly sincere and insane obsession.

The authenticity of Arquette's passion is as inspiring as his crazy wrestling stunts are scary and bizarre. The high point of the movie finds David finding genuine success and positive buzz in the world of wrestling, among people who had loathed him for mocking their sport. Then, David gets in the ring with a man by the name of Nick Gage. Nick Gage is what is known as a death match wrestler and his match with David, was nearly quite literally, a death match after a spot involving a shard of glass from a light tube goes horrifically wrong.

I have to stop here because I don't want to ruin anything for those who don't know what David Arquette has been putting himself through for the last two years, or even the 16 years prior where his obsession built and built before boiling over into this documentary. It's a fascinating and deeply compelling story that is a real joy to behold. The documentary has an inspiring quality that I was not expecting while still providing an unflinching look at an obsession that is not entirely healthy.

Wrestling, for David Arquette, was not a stunt or a desperate, shrieking attempt to garner publicity. It wasn't a grand art project ala the late Andy Kaufman who appeared to use 'wrassling' as a form of performance art. For David Arquette, wrestling is about childlike nostalgia and as we see in You Cannot Kill David Arquette, wrestling became therapy, a physical manifestation of every physical and emotional turmoil he'd survived in the past nearly two decades. Wrestling is catharsis and being accepted back into that world, even respected within that world, may just be the burden lifting moment that changes Arquette for good.

You Cannot Kill David Arquette will be available for streaming rental on Friday, August 28th.