“Reed has done fine work in telling us a highly significant story, but at this stage there is not enough more of it to tell.”
Leaving Neverland 2, Channel 4
““He was one of the kindest, most loving, caring people I knew and he also sexually abused me for seven years … I guess it sort of became a routine, masturbating, the oral sex. I was seven.” More than five years on from Dan Reed’s mind-blowing four-hour documentary Leaving Neverland, the words of Wade Robson remain profoundly shocking. Reed’s follow-up film, Leaving Neverland 2: Surviving Michael Jackson (Channel 4), repeats the jaw-dropping accusations against the singer by Robson and James Safechuck. It also offers a more reflective study of what it was like to be in the public eye — the public airing of your most intimate traumas, being vilified by Jackson fans, opposed by lawyers for the companies run in the Jackson name and still, as the men claim, with justice unserved. Jackson may be dead, but those who ran his support network still have serious questions to answer, they claim.”
Ben Dowell, The Times
“While Leaving Neverland could be forgiven for setting out the accusers’ testimony without peppering it with denials from their more powerful opponent, it would be useful now to hear from MJJ Productions. Reed shows us a letter where he begs them to participate in this new film – he highlights a paragraph where he literally writes: “I’m begging you.” Their refusal means the question of who knew what within Jackson’s staff can’t properly be explored. Reed has done fine work in telling us a highly significant story, but at this stage there is not enough more of it to tell.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian
“For many former Michael Jackson fans, the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland marked a horrific line in the sand. Convenient arguments about separating the art from the artist felt cheap and redundant as the film gave a voice to Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who alleged that, as children, they’d been groomed and abused by the self-appointed King of Pop. Jackson’s reputation has never recovered. Six years later, director Dan Reed has made a well-intentioned but unnecessary sequel, Leaving Neverland 2: Surviving Michael Jackson. It has little new to say about Jackson and the crimes of which he has been accused (and which he consistently denied up to his death in 2009). Instead, the film is an often tedious critique of the glacial pace of the American civil justice system.”
Ed Power, The I
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