Chris Smith tells the tale of the 2019 College bribery scandal in a new Netflix documentary “Operation Varsity Blues”. The director’s unique approach of using wiretaps to almost entirely tell the story is something many journalist’s mentioned when reviewing this documentary .it added a brilliant, unique touch to the story, and the fact that they were extracted from real recordings certainly gave us the chills. 

The movie starts with clips of students receiving their acceptance letters, a very wholesome way to start such a distressing case. It’s easy to infer that Smith did this to evoke feelings of strong hatred later in the film when you hear about the cheated admissions.

 Then he starts the story telling with news footage of multiple news stations talking about the case–all with resentment. One thing I did notice is that Smith never tried to show empathy for Rick Singer and his clients, which is usually in a lot of documentaries–even ones involving murder–he director causes a conflict of emotion for the views, pulling them to different sides with every scene. Yet, in this case, there was no defending Singer.

The film was evidently made for parents and guardians of college students. If the director would have wanted to connect more to the college-applying teenager’s I’m sure he would have given more focus to Olivia Jade. She was a prominent influencer among that age group and even had collaborations with top influencers like David Dobrik.

 The documentary also neglected to get deeper  into the celebrities’ aspects of the case which would have made the documentary far more attractive and dramatic. Smith instead took a respectful approach and only focused on Singer’s life. The angle of the documentary wasn’t clear. Smith basically just made the film an extended summary of the wire taps that were conducted. 

It was a very average movie. If your are true crime fanatic this isn’t something worth investing your time, but if you are interested in Hollywood crimes this may appeal to you. For general viewer’s this isn’t a good movie night film but rather a background film for when your preoccupied with homework. Overall the documentary was a solid 7/10.