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I, Tonya


Can you name the winners of the last three Super Bowls?  How about the last three World Series?  You can't, can you, you worthless piece of shit?  But I'd bet all the maple syrup in Montreal that you know tons about Tom Brady's Deflategate suspension, Michael Vick doing time for running a dog fighting ring, and the MLB's ongoing steroids scandal.


Excellence is fleeting, but infamy is forever.


Case in point.  Ask 100 people who won the gold medal in Ladies' Single Figure Skating at the 1994 Winter Olympics.  Maybe one of them will know that it was Oksana Baiul.  Closer to 10 will recall correctly that the silver medal went to Nancy Kerrigan.  But 100 out of 100 will remember the name of the eighth place finisher, Tonya Harding.  Not because she finished eighth.  Because she was involved in the Great Kerrigan Kneecapping of '94.


For anyone too young to know it, some random dude hit Kerrigan in the leg with a lead pipe (fine, telescoping metal baton) a month before the Olympics.  Only it turned out the dude wasn't so random.  He'd been hired by Harding's husband, Jeff Gillooly, and her bodyguard, Shawn Eckhardt, to take out Kerrigan, one of Tonya's biggest rivals.


Whether Harding ordered the "hit" on Kerrigan or even knew about it ahead of time is just one of the many intriguing questions I, Tonya completely fails to answer.


Instead, this bilious biopic gives us not one or two but four unreliable narrators in the form of Tonya (Margot Robbie "The Robot"), her fucker of a mother ("Elvis Costello's" Allison Janney), Gillooly ("Belle And" Sebastian Stan) and Eckhardt (Paul Walter "Cole" Hauser).


Was Tonya abused her entire life, first by mommy dearest and then by Gillooly, or was she a born bitch more likely to throw a punch than take one?  Was her mother a devoted but penniless parent driven to give her daughter a better life than she had or a she-devil, ice rink pageant mom-ster?  I, Tonya ain't telling.  It's content just to fling it all up on screen monkey-shit-style and call it a day.


I, Tonya nails the triple asshole, double cunts combo but fails to medal thanks to not having Robbie reenact Harding's sex tape.  Iceholes.


January 12, 2018