30 For 30's Stanley Cup riot episode doesn't score
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
On June 15, 2011, the Boston Bruins and the Vancouver Canucks faced off in a Stanley Cup Game 7 in Vancouver, BC. It didn't go well for the Canucks, and the subsequent "unrest" in the crowd outside the venue came to live in infamy.
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The story
30 For 30 has one of the best track records – as it were – in documentary filmmaking. In the almost 15 years (!) since ESPN's sports-doc franchise debuted, it's made some of the great films in the doc genre, period; more to the point, it's put out only a handful I would even characterize as "meh" (and I can only think of one I actively disliked). Unfortunately, Asia Youngman and Kathleen Jayme's recent look back at the 2011 Stanley Cup riot, "I'm Just Here for the Riot," is one of 30 For 30's lesser lights.
It's not that hockey is the topic; for one thing, hockey isn't really the topic – it's the non-wisdom of crowds and the role of social media in post-offense public shaming – and I've gotten a lot out of hockey-forward 30 For 30s in the past. The actual topic is compelling, and the filmmakers get solid access to participants, to Vancouver law enforcement, and to cultural commentators like Jon Ronson, the author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed.
But the actual topic is…pretty massive, in fact, and one of 30 For 30's draws historically is its filmmakers' ability (usually) to use sports stories as doorways into other, larger conversations, about racism, about the media, about "child stardom" or class divides or the perils of nationalism – so it's not like I had concerns about the filmmakers using an event that technically started at/because of a hockey game, but really wanted to talk about youthful offenders and/or the surveillance net that is social media.
"I'm Just Here for the Riot" kind of feels like the filmmakers did have concerns, though, or just didn't slice the What It All Means narrow enough. The footage of the riot is discomfiting, and builds effectively to that point in any madding-crowd situation where you feel like it's permanently out of control, but then it jumps to the next morning and participants' feelings in the aftermath, without communicating how authorities did get a handle on a huge gathering of drunk people who'd gone from zero to car-burning in what felt like 15 minutes. I kept thinking the first-person recollections of various "case figures" might add up to something about the collective consciousness of crowds and how mood momentum works in these situations; it never did.
And it takes two thirds of "I'm Just Here"'s runtime for the previous hockey riot, and its designated scapegoat, to show up in the narrative. That one went down before everyone had the internet in their pockets…on June 14, 1994. "I'm Just Here" is ostensibly about "the first smartphone riot" and what that meant, culturally, so burying a comp that direct, that happened three days before a certain low-speed chase cut off every other story's blood supply for like a year and a half? Weird choice.
"I'm Just Here" overall feels tentative, overmatched. It needs to set up from a single angle: kids doing dumb kid shit and what those consequences did, or should have, looked like; the Vancouver police failing to prepare for a riot they'd been through once before, then scraping socials to bring charges; parallels to the summer of 2020 or to J6 investigations; the "main character" cycle's bear-attack levels of ruthlessness and speed. It doesn't. Instead, there's a too-long valedictory installation of sorts at the end, and various interviewees walking through it and making pronouncements about rehabilitation and learning from mistakes. It's like "I'm Just Here" kept postponing a choice about which of a handful of movies it wanted to be, but never ended up deciding.
The 1994 "perp" I mentioned earlier, Trevor Holness, would have made a great linchpin for "I'm Just Here." Holness, who got made an example of – disproportionately, I suspect, but he doesn't seem to feel incorrectly – for his involvement in the first Stanley Cup riot, attended the 2011 game, and had a couple of excellent insights about human and crowd behavior. He notes that people see something unfolding "that doesn't happen every day" and want to make themselves a part of it, "even if it's not a good thing." Following Holness, his hockey fandom, and his maturation alongside the evolution of…I don't know, defeats experienced collectively by fan groups in the Meta age? That might have given "I'm Just Here" the tight focus it needed to say something broader.