The Hatchet Wielding (hyphens guys! hyphens!) Hitchhiker is a perfectly ok documentary from Netflix. It’s yet another in a long series of true crime docs, though a little less lurid at first? Maybe?

The doc covers a social media kerfuffle from back in 2013 (egads! the distant past!) where a hitchhikin’ surfer dude took a hatchet to a lunatic who was actively attacking a bystander after he crashed his car, declared himself Jesus, and that all black people should die. The surfer dude gets interviewed and becomes an instant online folk hero… except he might not be the casual dude people thinks he is.

I missed the vast majority of these public events so I was getting caught up on the big social media viral explosion… And thus it was an interesting story to me. Whether this will be interesting to you will probably depend on how familiar you are with these events.

And then the doc keeps going and going and gets far less interesting right when it should be getting more interesting.

This doc is ok… it’s watchable and amusing in an “I’d never fall for this guy’s shtick” self-satisfactory armchair quarterbacking way. It’s interesting for awhile, and then it drags. But it was an alright watch, sure.

Score: 76