McMillions starts with a post it on the computer screen of the most boring guy in the most boring FBI office, Jacksonville, Florida. The paper reads: "Fraud in McDonald's Monopoly?" Well, that is read by one Doug Matthews, the volunteer FBI agent who has been assigned to that office. Matthews is the main protagonist of this whole history of fraud, undercover operations, mafia, shady business, blackmail and extortion. It is he who asks his partner to let him investigate what the other - who does not participate in the documentary - had written there after receiving several calls warning of this possible fraud. Obviously, I had no intention of investigating it. This is Jacksonville.
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In 1985, McDonald's commissioned Simon Marketing, the same agency that brought them the idea of the children's menu (Happy Meal), a game that would help them boost sales. Then one inspired by the Monopoly was created. Attached to paper cups or advertisements in the press, there were small cards that corresponded to boxes of the famous board game and that could, on their own or in combination with others, contain prizes that ranged from free meals to a million dollars. Between 1989 and 2001, a guy (then two) known as Uncle Jerry managed to defraud up to 24 million of this game.
The first suspicions are born at the moment in which it is uncovered that a relevant number of winners are connected to each other. There begins the investigation of Matthews, who is a mixture of hyper-motivated office mate, frustrated actor and Boy Scout monitor. You love him or you hate him. With him as a great narrator and animator the documentary finds a more cinematic story than similar products have accustomed us. The rhythm is frantic, the constant script twists and perplexity, unlike what happens in many passages of Making A Murderer (Netflix) or Wild Wild Country (Netflix) is more hilarious than shocking. There are no dead here. Well, what's wrong with sisar a handful of millions of dollars to a company worth billions?
Towards the middle of the third episode the descacarante begins to live with the disturbing. What has so far been a succession of rocambolesque situations solved in the least intuitive way possible becomes something darker. Until then, we have seen Mathews put on a golden suit to get to know the people of McDonald's in order to inform them that a lot of the winners of Monopoly, that game that has made their sales increase by 40% are familiar or neighbors. We have seen FBI agents pretending to be television teams recording fraudulent winners, while they tell their story without even knowing how to hold a camera. Then, almost suddenly, we discovered that Uncle Jerry (both) is not a scammer to use, nor a Robin Hood; He is a mobster and, with mobsters, it is difficult to laugh until the end.
It could be debated whether the best fiction is one that reminds of reality or that bets on just the opposite: imagine the unimaginable. Less debatable seems to say that in the field of nonfiction the most interesting is that which portrays a reality that is unimaginable. In this particular, McMillions has no one to overcome. From its premise to its development, through its main and secondary characters, its subplots and even its aesthetic commitment, this six-episode documentary series directed by James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte for HBO contains the most celebrated elements of the best thriller, the best financial fiction, the best humor manners. Seeing McMillions, one does not think about the real world, but about the cinema of the Coen, that of Soderbergh or Argo . Imagine the characters of Fargo starring in the Enron documentary (The guys who cheated America) .
It is built on images of the time (late nineties), old McDonald's ads, FBI recordings, somewhat awkward recreations of some of the events that are narrated and that are not documented and current interviews with some of the key characters . All this ends up forming an aesthetic corpus that can result in an ugly or simply inevitable principle, but which has strength and coherence and is even in tune with some audiovisual bets held in recent years.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have bought the rights to the story for $ 1 million as it was reported in The Daily Beast in 2018 by event expert journalist Jeff Maysh. It is very likely that the film is easier to believe than this documentary series. The complicated thing is going to be at least as fun.
