Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn’ on Netflix, a Sloppy Documentary About a Corrupt Celeb-CEO

Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn (now on Netflix) is the story of a celeb-CEO who went from the top of the world to Interpol’s most-wanted list – which, knowing what we know about the CEO-to-worker earning ratio, sounds about right, doesn’t it? Ghosn was the guy who saved both Renault and Nissan from the depths of near-insolvency, and became a superstar businessman in France and Japan and many points in-between. But there would come a time when he was smuggled out of Japan in a box, notably while he was still alive, because movies aren’t likely to be titled Fugitive when they’re about not-dead people. (Spoiler alert: there were probably holes cut in the box so he could breathe.) Anyway, this documentary shows us how he ended up in such a humiliating subterfuge situation.

FUGITIVE: THE CURIOUS CASE OF CARLOS GHOSN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “What happened? is the big question,” a voice says over an opening montage teasing the crazy story of Carlos Ghosn. “What happened is money.” And I guess if you have enough of it and want to keep it, be it ill-gotten or not, you’ll stuff yourself in a musical instrument case and hire guys to get you over the border however they can. The film begins in 1996, when Renault hired Ghosn as a deputy to the CEO, specifically to pull their asses from the fire. By 1998, he made the company profitable again, and it only took 3,000 factory workers losing their jobs to do it. Renault then forged a partnership with Nissan, and Ghosn oversaw the Japanese corporation’s shift from billions in the red to billions in the black, for which he cut 21,000 jobs, a move that made him extremely popular with dickheads and shitbirds worldwide.

So by 2001, our man was CEO of Nissan. At this point, we meet Ghosn’s housekeeper, who says, “I thought he looked like Mr. Bean,” and she can say that now that she no longer works for him. That’s a sort-of nice way of saying he was short and funny-looking, two things that didn’t get in the way of his becoming a charismatic mega-celeb who was “treated like a star” and was drawn as a superhero in manga. In public, he was dramatically unveiling new Nissan sports cars, and in the boardroom, he was no-nonsensing his way through meetings, and in the bedroom – well, who knows. He was married but that’s barely mentioned here; we meet his sister, and she’s kind of a colorful character, but did he have any other siblings? Who were his parents? It is a mystery solvable only by Wikipedia, I guess.

Ghosn preached frugality at the company, and lived it to a point. The housekeeper points out that he was frugal to the point where his clothes would be threadbare and stained before he bought new ones. During his first decade as Nissan’s CEO, he weathered controversies in which workers put in so many long, hard hours, it drove several of them to suicide. And then his CEO salary was made public, and it was gigantic, seven times that of Toyota’s CEO. And then we get a series of talking heads – lawyers, journalists – who tell us about Ghosn’s financial improprieties, ranging from money being embezzled from Nissan to offshore shell companies to egregious expenditure of company funds, e.g., a €630k Versailles party celebrating the Renault-Nissan alliance that also happened to fall on his birthday and whose invite list barely included any of his co-workers. Some say he was given too much autonomy and trust, and he took advantage; others say he was extremely paranoid and had a bit of a god complex. Eventually he resigned as CEO, and then was booted from the board – and then was arrested in Tokyo, where he was detained and then let out on bail and then stuffed in a box and shipped to Lebanon.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Another middling-to-lousy Netflix doc about a notorious nut-slash-famous-guy boasting a really long title with a cliche in it, Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee.

Performance Worth Watching: Former Nissan corporate lawyer Ravinda Passi, who pulls off his glasses and rubs his face and deliberates over how he can diplomatically word Ghosn’s misdeeds and says…

Memorable Dialogue: “Deliberate obfuscation for the purposes of ulterior motives.” – Lawyer guy goes hard on the lawyerspeak

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Curious, how this documentary turns into narrative mush in its last half-hour. Not that Fugitive wasn’t a bit all over the road in the first place – it’s chock-full of reenactments, archival footage, talking heads and a woman who breaks the fourth wall and says she’s an actress and occasionally drops in to explain things, and she helps a bit, but not much. We get a narrative that strings together a series of biographical and-thens and tons of third-party commentary on the nature of Ghosn as a man, but never gets a firm grip on who he was, his motives, his passions, his peccadilloes. There’s a lot of talk about his being like an “emperor” or that struggles at the top of the corporate heap were “like Game of Thrones, Nissan edition,” but not much in the way of follow-up details; it’s a lot of empty assertions.

The third-act timeline of Ghosn’s legal troubles is smudged and difficult to follow. It fixates on reenacted shots of him stuffed in a crate and wheeled through the airport, because hey, that was pretty wild. Meanwhile, director Lucy Blakstad cuts in clips of a Ghosn post-escape speech, eliminating context in a moment of, um, non-deliberate obfuscation for purposes I can’t discern. There’s a through-line about Japan’s deeply flawed justice system, which allows lengthy detention and brutal interrogation before hearings or trials, but shows little interest in the nuts and bolts of the allegations the guy was facing. The film never bothers to parse whether Japanese authorities had a strong case against him or not, or even what, exactly, they were charging him with. It’s more interested in his being stuffed into a literal physical case.

I’m left convinced that Ghosn is a fascinating individual of questionable scruples, and is absolutely worthy of a scrutinous documentary, but Fugitive isn’t it. The film feels incomplete, sketchy, a little bit lazy and a little too enamored with the one single sensational component of this story – this story, which is ultimately about yet another corrupt rich guy who, for some reason, decided he wasn’t quite rich enough, and acted on it. Why was he this way? The movie doesn’t have an answer. Hell, it barely asks the question.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn is more rough-draft biography than inquisitive deep-dive into a compelling hypocrite of a public figure.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.