LeonDeon

Look, when you know someone in your personal life who is a consistent liar and performer, you have to call them out; otherwise, it'll just keep spiraling. Taylor Parker is the kind of person who, from the jump, is someone you'd want everyone you know to stay far away from. When someone enters your life and slowly begins to isolate you from others, you know that nothing good can come of it. How Wade never understood anything about Taylor will never cease to boggle my mind. How no one stepped in sooner will never cease to baffle me. But as a documentary, is this good? For a Netflix documentary, this is about as middle of the road as you can get. It's pretty tasteless to name this film *Maternal Instinct*. It seems like a title you'd see on ID's litany of true-crime documentaries. Yet so much of the film leaves you wishing for more investigation into the many personas Taylor used to trick people. You'll have former friends show up for one *small* section of the film, describing who she was when she was younger, only to move quickly to the documentary's current timeline. Taylor is the kind of person who could've had a smaller docuseries made about her because of who she was. She was never herself, the world never knew the real Taylor, and Taylor doesn't even know who the *real* Taylor is. The doc could've massively benefited from more interrogation room footage, as that's among the most compelling footage involving Taylor, given who she is and what she did. Yet the film features only brief moments sprinkled throughout the last third of its runtime. That footage is just begging for more mileage than what we get in the doc. However, some of the best parts of the film focus on Reagan's family. Director Jessica Dimmock knew to let the family speak about their beloved family member, what she meant to them, and the tragedy that occurred involving them. Some of the doc's best, most guttural moments lie with that family, and rightfully so given the incident involving Taylor and Reagan. By every measure, Taylor is a monster of a human being, compelling enough to be the subject of a documentary. Yet, the doc itself focuses on maintaining a trim running time, even though there is a wealth of information to explore with Taylor. Taylor was the kind of person to *only* have skeletons in her closet, and only given brief glimpses of what lies inside.

When you cast Mark Hamill nowadays, you gotta cast him as the villain he actually is. I wonder if his appreciation for Israel and the IDF affected his performance as The Major, given that Hamill aligns with the terrorist state of Israel’s culture of barbarism, nationalism, and depravity.