Netflix’s ‘The Real Bling Ring’ Adds Little to the Alexis Haines Story: TV Review
variety.comDaniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The story of Alexis Haines’ entanglement with a circle of Los Angeles-area home invaders has been told multiple times over: In the reporting of Nancy Jo Sales, who profiled her for Vanity Fair in 2010; on her own reality show, “Pretty Wild,” which aired on E!
in 2010; and in Sofia Coppola’s 2013 film “The Bling Ring,” based on Sales’ work. Now, Haines (formerly Alexis Neiers), along with former associate Nick Norgo (formerly Nick Prugo), attempts to set the record straight in the Netflix documentary series “The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist.” The three-episode series sheds little light, and bulks out its running time with idle musings on fame that feel warmed over from the early 2010s.
It’s not that Haines’ and Norgo’s stories, told with both respective parties’ permission in this doc, don’t have inherent interest: Both of them became entranced by the concept of celebrity and, as part of the “bling ring” cabal, stole cash and belongings from the homes of famous people, including Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Orlando Bloom. (One of their victims, “The Hills” personality Audrina Patridge, speaks to the camera for “The Real Bling Ring.”) But Haines and Norgo both are self-aggrandizing in a manner that wears thin after a while; their conflicting memories of who said what to whom more than a decade ago is of only the lightest academic interest.
And the milieu in which they still operate comes to feel icky after a while. Norgo’s disappointment with the actor who played him in Coppola’s film not being a young Tom Cruise type hangs in the air, left in as if to mock his sense of himself.
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