Editor’s Note: Normally this week, Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston would be down in Austin for South-By-Southwest’s film festival, catching as many premieres as he can in between tacos and fun walks down a crowded 6th Street. But like last year, SXSW 2022 is a virtual edition, so he’s at home like the rest of us. Luckily, he’s still watching all the films worth seeing, and reviewing them in our film section; keep it locked to our continuing coverage as the fest unfolds.
Remember when viral marketing had a sense of danger about it? Sure, it’s probably for the best that CEOs aren’t wandering the streets with their Social Security numbers plastered over trucks inviting hackers and thieves to test the mettle of their cybersecurity form (spoiler alert: It was a very poor idea) or that overeager inventors aren’t hurling themselves against plate-glass windows in skyscrapers to try and prove that they’re shatterproof, only to wind up on the pavement, with the frame giving way instead of the glass itself. But there used to be a kind of American hucksterism about how they went about selling inventions to the masses, which looked to offset the concerns consumers might have about a product by opening themselves up somewhat to the danger — if it’s safe enough for these guys to use it, then it should be safe enough for you. Ramin Bahrani’s 2nd Chance documents the life and times of perhaps the most reckless of them all: Richard Davis, the man who invented the bulletproof vest, and shot himself nearly 200 times on camera to show that it worked to the first responders — cops, military, coast guard, whatever — who would ultimately make up his audience.
Davis was the kind of entrepreneur who skirted the line between flim-flam man and genius inventor, an alleged fraudster who was accused of burning down his Detroit pizzeria to get the seed money for his company, Second Chance, and who also may have concocted his own origin story, given that nobody can find any proof that he was actually shot on a delivery run after plugging two of the three guys who tried to rob him. What’s irrefutable is that, for a long while, his invention worked, and it worked well: his vests saved lives, after all, and his intentions were somewhat decent. He grew up in the shadows of his father, a veteran who spent nights on Iwo Jima sandwiched next to the corpse of his best friend, which may have seeded the idea for body armor in Richard’s brain. How many lives could have been saved had those soldiers in the Pacific had protection from gunfire? Over the course of the film, he unravels his life’s story to Bahrani, walking him through his perspectives on the conflicts that defined his career, from trying to bribe a juvenile delinquent into saying that it was his gun, not small arms fire from the ranch and shooting range in rural Michigan that Richard owned, that hit an old lady’s house and caused her to suffer a heart attack, to the Zylon fiasco, where Second Chance bet it all on a poorly-tested material for their new vests and subsequently covered-up the fact that they didn’t work, putting countless numbers of people in harm’s way if not outright resulting in their wholly-preventable deaths. He’s an involving subject, to be sure, running his company like a family business, alternating between backwater mafia boss and genial CEO, oftentimes in the same sentence.
Bahrani’s style here owes a heavy debt to someone like Alex Gibney, which makes a decent amount of sense, given that Gibney’s style has commanded so much attention over the last decade or so and this is, after all, Bahrani’s first feature-length doc (you may remember him from his indie hits Man Push Cart and Goodbye Solo, as well as his HBO adaptation of Farenheit 451). You can see the fruits of that influence in how painlessly it unfurls. Despite being a compilation of talking heads oftentimes being interrogated on camera (with shades of Errol Morris in the occasional combativeness with how he provokes his subjects), it’s fast-paced and informative, compelling in the anecdotes that it teases out and emphasizes. He’s very fortunate to have chosen a subject who was so enamored with seeing himself on video, as there’s plenty of intriguing (and occasionally quite campy) archival footage from Davis’s time as the head of Second Chance, plugging himself with high-caliber ammunition at point-blank range, growing in confidence that it will work every single time, to the point where it eventually just becomes akin to a party trick for him. Laughing off a .45 slug to the breastbone is, of course, quite different than pulling a tablecloth off of your buddy’s fold-out during the Super Bowl halftime show, but Davis remains as calm and collected as one could hope for, save for two major moments: the very first time he did so (in which he reacts with a shock that it worked and is surprised that it hurt), and when he’s trying to shoot his son for a video after the Zylon fiasco and breaks down, terrified that he’ll kill his son because of how little he trusts his own vests.
Yet 2nd Chance follows the Gibney model a little too closely for its own good. Bahrani also acts as narrator for much of the film, which is a poor choice — he’s an excellent storyteller where it counts, but his laconic, energy-free narration contrasts so heavily with the larger-than-life personas that he’s trying to capture that it just acts like dead weight on an otherwise snappy and energetic story. There’s also the fact that he falls under the spell of “the great man,” even as he tries so hard to tear him down: Davis’s story is fascinating, but even more interesting is the tale of the man who helped to bring him down, Aaron Westrick, who might not have been the man who invented the bulletproof vest, but was ultimately seems to be the person that Davis wished he was. He was a “save,” a term coined by Davis for survivors of shootings who were wearing Second Chance armor at the time of the incident, who left the police force and joined up when Davis came a-calling, and who wholly fell under his spell until the Zylon incident. You can see the wide-eyed enthusiasm he has for the enterprise in all of the archival footage, and the awe with which he regards the man to whom he believes he owes his life, which makes the eventual betrayal — Bahrani plays the audio of the wiretap in all of its damning glory — that much more painful. But his disillusionment takes the backseat to Davis’ huckster antics and ultimately helps kneecap the film’s most powerful moment, in which Westrick reconnects with the man who shot him all of those years ago, who went on to live a good life after paying for the consequences of his youthful error. Their embrace — two men, united by spilled blood, whose lives bizarrely parallel each other’s — is a wholesome moment amidst all of the bullshit, and one wonders what 2nd Chance might have looked like had it focused on this man as a protagonist instead.