"What do you you when your best friend kills your other best friend?"
It's pretty hard to follow the jaw dropping revelations of 2015's Emmy award winning documentary, "The Jinx", but 2024's THE JINX: PART TWO has plenty of real life surprises up its sleeve across 6 new episodes.
It should be all over, right?
But no, uber-wealthy real estate tycoon Robert Durst is still a master manipulator, even from behind bars for the 9 years, since the events of the last installment.
If you haven't seen PART ONE, stop reading now, watch it and come back.
Okay....ready?
At the end of the original miniseries, Durst was caught in an off handed remark, miked up and confessing to the fact that he had killed multiple people.
What's fascinating about this Chapter Two (and I'm not going to give away anything revealed in this new installment) is how Durst lines up weak lackey after weak confidant, all of them spellbound by his wealth and willing to bend their own flexible morality for an almighty dollar, or $250,000 of them.
The early chapters deal with Durst and the public's reaction to the final episode of documentary filmmaker Andrew Jarecki's original series. That final reveal was one of the best moments of TV in recent history, featuring a real-life "Perry Mason" moment and the best "oops, I forgot I left my microphone on" moment since Leslie Nielsen's sound-filled visit to the Men's Room in "The Naked Gun".
We watch the attorneys and people involved sitting together at a watch party for the original HBO airing with Jarecki, dumbfounded when Durst spills it.
Durst goes on the run and Jarecki details how masterful Durst is at gaming the system and using pawns around him at his bidding. After he is found and arrested, this new Part Two deals with all of the trials, planning, avoidance, Covid delays and masterful Durst manipulation since.
I loved being embedded with Prosecutor John Lewin, one of the few men to go toe-to-toe with Durst and remain unfazed. Lewin's dogged tenacity is the driving force behind every episode.
One of Durst's most loyal friends, Nick Chavin, is a fascinating watch as well. A briefly-famous, 15-minutes-of-fame singer who crafted some of the foulest songs every published, Chavin smells fame circling Durst and hovers, starving for another, longer taste. Watching Chavin's perspective change and the defeat of his final moments are packed with surprising empathy.
It's inherent in this new installment that we get more closure, but we had plenty of discussion after the sixth and last episode about the one person still very much wrapped in Durst's wealth and infamy.
Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans) delivers another fast paced, fascinating look at wealth, power and murder. Who would have thought there was this much story left to tell?
With the clever, eccentric, dangerous and often funny Robert Durst still front and center, THE JINX: PART TWO gets an A.
My favorite moment, every time: "This is a pre-paid call from....BOB!"
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