Shawn Mendes: In Wonder (2020)
IMDb rating: 6.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 83%
“This isn’t the story of a famous musician. This is the story of a guy growing up.” That’s how 22-year-old pop star Shawn Mendes starts his Netflix Original documentary, In Wonder. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at not just his career, but also his tours, his life away from the stage, and his performances on the stage. But mostly his recent tours.
Don’t expect hard-core, in-depth scenes that will change your mind about Shawn. He’s light and fluffy and all the things that are right with pop music. He’s a polished act now in his ninth year of touring and making music.
This isn’t for hardened music fans, but rather Shawn’s fans who flocked in droves to buy his fourth album, Wonder, in 2019. It’s a sentiment shared by Chris Azzopardi from nytimes.com, who says “this wants so much to be a humanising portrait, but it doesn’t go deep enough to crack Mendes’s polished love-crooner veneer, nor does it say anything new about fame that hasn’t been said in other pop-star docs of recent years. With its revelations tenuous, its function is clear: to promote his upcoming album.”
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.
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