Review: 'Who Is Luigi Mangione?'

If you watch the new Investigation Discovery true crime special Who Is Luigi Mangione?, you are likely going into it knowing that you will not, in fact, learn anything especially insightful about the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street last December.

It's not that it's impossible to put together a compelling look at Mangione, but just the compressed time frame for the production suggests the producers didn't have much time to conduct in-depth interviews, much less investigate. So what viewers are left with are a bunch of talking head interviews that serve more as Copaganda than anything resembling context. None of the people speaking on camera had any direct knowledge of Mangione. They know what they've read, which means the only difference between them and the average viewer is that they had the opportunity to speculate out loud in front of a camera.

Granted, the producers couldn't have known that by the time the documentary aired, having New York City mayor Eric Adams talk about the radicalization of youth while apparently reading off of cue cards would bring an unintended hilarity to the segment. But some of the other choices were just as unsatisfying.

I'm not sure I ever need to hear from Dan Abrams again, but here he is. And even when he's providing commentary that makes some level of sense, he does it in a way that is annoyingly smug and dismissive.

Former Wives With Knives host Casey Jordan has the opposite problem. She speculates about Mangione's state of mind during the court proceedings based apparently on how he sat in his chair and responded to the judge. And to be honest, despite her claims, I didn't see anything about his behavior that seemed that different than most of the defendants you'll see in court facing murder charges.

The special also includes a number of social media posts from Mangione, and it's never clear who is reading them. It could be an actor, it could be AI or just random person the producers plucked up off the streets.  But the voice is never identified during the show, which I found fairly distracting as I was listen to the posts being read out loud.

To be clear, this is a morally complex case. Murder is never the correct choice. But I suspect that many of us who have dealt with UnitedHealthcare or some other large health insurance provider have more than once speculated that someone deserves to be punished for their decisions.

That complexity would make for an interesting documentary. But it would also require a lot more time and resources than were available here. So instead, we get the lightweight Who Is Luigi Mangione? A special which not only doesn't answer that question, it doesn't even provide the framework for trying to figure it out.

Who Is Luigi Mangione? premieres Monday, February 17th, 2025 on Investigation Discovery.