Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee’ on Netflix, a Documentary About a Bewildering Madman

Netflix documentary Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee allows us to spend 115 minutes with a heavily armed mega-paranoid tech millionaire, Libertarian presidential hopeful and suspected murderer who does a lot of drugs, drinks a lot of booze, seems to exist in a constantly agitated state of paranoid delusion and who was once called “bonkers” by the prime minister of Belize. You can’t say that about just anybody, I guess. And that’s why just anybody isn’t the subject of a feature documentary, which may test your tolerance for the company of lunatics.

RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL: THE WILD WORLD OF JOHN MCAFEE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: You almost certainly know the name McAfee – it regularly pops up on your computer to tell you if your machine is gunked up with viruses (or, more accurately, to tell you your subscription to the service is expired and it’s time to pay the f— up). John McAfee wrote that software, and it made him rich, and pretty much a household name, even if you might not recognize his face. Well, his face is all over this movie, so get used to it, and some insane things come out of the mouth in that face, such as “Clearly, I am a flight risk. I specialize in flighting” and third-person self-referencing craziness like, “So, is McAfee a successful entrepreneur who went mad and killed his neighbor, or is he the potential savior of America?” He also compares himself to James Bond, Scarface and Indiana Jones, like any well-adjusted person does while looking in the mirror every morning. McAfee says all these things in the get-a-load-of-this-guy montage intro we see at the beginnings of so many documentaries, so they keep us watching to find out how and why this person does so much crazy shit.

Two key characters here are Vice journos Rocco Castoro and Robert King, who filmed McAfee during a time of intense turmoil: Having sold his stake in his ubiquitous software, McAfee retired to Belize, a country reputed for its political corruption, thus making it easier for rich tycoons to throw around bribes and generally get away with shit while holed up in remote seaside mansions. McAfee’s neighbor, Gregory Faull, had been murdered, shot in the back of the head, and guess who the primary suspect was. Right. McAfee beefed with Faull over McAfee’s dogs. McAfee was always drunk and/or bazonked on drugs. McAfee had a lot of guns. PLENTY of circumstantial evidence there.

Castoro and King meet up with McAfee as he’s on the run, believing the government put a price on his head, and we’re not quite sure why – possibly because of the murder, possibly for other nefarious secret spy reasons. He wears a goofy disguise and pretends to be physically impaired so he won’t be recognized. One night, he gets word from somewhere, perhaps inside his own head, that someone’s on the way to get him, and everyone – Castoro, King, McAfee and his 18-year-old girlfriend Sam Herrera – piles in a van and GTFOs. The journalists were too slow. He almost left them behind, he tells them. “Sorry man,” is all Castoro can say. And then McAfee piles everyone on a boat to Guatemala, where they arrive illegally, and he tries to bribe customs and it doesn’t work, so Herrera calls her uncle, who used to be Guatemala’s attorney general, and McAfee appears to fake a heart attack, and…

And that was in 2012. It goes on, and on. And only gets nuttier. Castoro and King jumped off the Batshit Express, although King would eventually resume filming McAfee in 2019. King, a war photographer for 30 years who gave it up to be a farmer and temporarily gave that up to continue filming McAfee, who was often wacked on bath salts, glugging down Johnnie Walker Black right out of the bottle and/or packing heat. In the seven years between, McAfee had returned to America, ditched Herrera, contacted a ghost writer named Alex Cody Foster – interviewed here – about writing his story, ran for President of the United States, married a former prostitute named Janice who says she was once urged by cartel members to poison her husband, fled in a boat “formerly owned by the Wolf of Wall Street” hoping “the cartel” wouldn’t follow him to the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, somehow wasn’t charged with Faull’s murder (which has never been solved) and generally continued to lose his mind. Remember the question McAfee asked earlier? I’ll hazard a guess: He’s mad.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Running with the Devil is like Citizenfour crossed with Grizzly Man: tech guy in trouble embarks on a delusional journey. (For additional context, check out Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee, the 2016 documentary about McAfee).

Performance Worth Watching: King is the sympathetic character here, a man who’s clearly traumatized by his decades of documenting death and destruction – and who we see with a single tear going down his face when he learns that McAfee is dead.

Memorable Dialogue: The big question:

Offscreen voice: Did you ever think, “This is bullshit, there’s no one after us”?

King: Yes.

Sex and Skin: A brief shot of McAfee in a strip club.

Our Take: Don’t watch Running with the Devil to “figure out” John McAfee, or determine whether he truly used his hacker skills to create spyware to acquire all kinds of secrets from the CIA, NSA, KGB, White House, etc., all of whom wanted to kill or capture him, or maybe he was using that information to leverage his power, or- well, don’t expect this documentary to give us a clear picture, which may be impossible, a true fool’s errand, especially considering McAfee died in 2021, of suicide in prison, although there are Epsteinish conspiracy theories about that, of course. Feel free to sigh deeply.

It’s not until the final half-hour that director Charlie Russell settles down for a minute and grounds the story with some biographical content about McAfee’s life, and by that point, we’re gasping for such insight. It’s not quite enough, because the film then indulges further blockbuster hearsay speculation about the guy, and it feels slightly irresponsible from a journalistic standpoint; the movie’s final scene is especially maddening, the type of fodder that exists to titillate when it should be asking follow-up questions. This type of thing pushes the doc more towards sensationalism than truth-seeking.

Then again, what is truth, anyway, but something we chase forever and never really, truly acquire? And what is McAfee’s story but a metaphor for that chase? Well, a loose one, anyway – and Running with the Devil churns up a state of constant turmoil that often seems to mirror McAfee’s existence. Beyond that, it’s a hangout movie, and our company is a delusional narcissistic maniac, something that tends to wear on a viewer. McAfee sure is one hell of an annoying high-decibel screech of a presence in the room, and far too slippery to inspire much empathy. You want to grab him by the lapels and throttle him until he comes clean about something, anything that might clean up this narrative, which makes Homer Simpson’s hallucinogenic-chili-pepper journey through the desert look as clear and concise as Cormac McCarthy prose. Bottom line: Spending this much time with McAfee teetered to the wrong side of the line between fascinating and driving me nuts.

Our Call: Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee certainly captures the discombobulating rollercoaster spirit of McAfee, but one wonders if a more measured approach to the madness might’ve offered more insight and less frustration. Maybe trying to know the unknowable is a fool’s errand. SKIP IT.

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