The story of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is genuinely strange: a 31-track double album, six years in the making, sold as a single physical object for $2 million to the most hated man in pharma, with an 88-year commercial embargo attached. That's a premise that practically writes itself. The Disciple, directed by Joanna Natasegara and executive produced by RZA, mostly ignores the premise in favor of profiling Tarik Azzougarh — Cilvaringz — the Dutch-Moroccan rapper who produced the album and whose personal archive forms the documentary's spine. Azzougarh is an interesting enough subject on paper. An immigrant kid in Holland who found Wu-Tang as an outsider, he clawed his way into RZA's inner circle through sheer persistence — showing up, calling, refusing to disappear. There's something genuinely fascinating in that arc, the fan who becomes the collaborator, the disciple who earns the room. But fascinating as a short profile; as the anchor of a 105-minute film, the weight becomes difficult to sustain. Azzougarh is even-keeled to the point of opacity, and without meaningful counter-testimony from other Wu-Tang members — who appear mainly in archival footage or for brief pleasantries — the film tilts into a one-sided love letter with no real friction. RZA is the obvious gap. He executive produced the film, which presumably gave Natasegara access, but it also seems to have constrained what she could probe. He appears only in archival footage or in staged, ponderous grayscale interludes in front of a chess board — a visual metaphor that gestures at strategic complexity the film never actually delivers. The mentor-protégé relationship at the heart of the story remains conveniently unexamined. The film's best stretch is the middle section, when the album project itself takes shape and the legitimate artistic questions come into focus: why is a Warhol worth millions while music is expected to be free? What does it mean to create something genuinely rare in an age of infinite reproduction? Cyrus Bozorgmehr, an adviser to the album, delivers the documentary's most honest line, admitting they had no idea what they were doing when buyers started pressing for specifics. That admission — that the whole project was half-concept, half-improvisation — is more interesting than anything the film does with it. Martin Shkreli, the $2 million punchline, doesn't arrive until the film's final third, arriving with reports that he planned to film mock-threatening videos aimed at Wu-Tang members. The film treats him gingerly, neither digging into his psychology nor seriously interrogating how Wu-Tang ended up selling their most personal project to him. PleasrDAO's 2021 purchase of the album for $4.75 million — the NFT collective now holding exhibitions — goes essentially unremarked upon in terms of its own ironies. Natasegara won her Oscar for The White Helmets, a film that succeeded because the stakes were existential and the access was extraordinary. Here, the stakes are cultural and the access is curated. The result is a documentary that knows what it wants to say about Cilvaringz — that he was a true believer who made something real happen — but doesn't have enough outside perspective, or enough willingness to complicate the portrait, to make that case stick for anyone who isn't already converted. For deep Wu-Tang heads, there's enough archival material, enough proximity to the rooms where things happened, to justify the 105 minutes. For everyone else, the film confirms something it probably didn't intend: the album's story is more interesting than the documentary about it.
