Unlike most true crime documentaries, Chiefsaholic: A Wolf in Chiefs Clothing (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) was lucky enough to have first-person access to the perpetrator in-between his malfeasances. Director Dylan Sires hung out with Xaviar Babudar while he was on bail following his arrest for a string of high-profile bank robberies, and before he jumped bail, prompting a multi-state manhunt. Why would Babudar agree to be in the film in the first place? Well, heâs a bit of an attention hog: Heâs a Kansas City Chiefs superfan, famous among the teamâs diehard followers for his head-to-toe wolf costume and viral social media presence, where he was known as âChiefsaholic.â His fellow Chiefs nuts always wondered how Babudar could afford to travel across the country and buy premium seats to all the away games and, well, hereâs your answer, fishbulb: The hundreds of thousands of dollars he stole funded his excursions. And the story only gets wilder and more complex from there.
CHIEFSAHOLIC: A WOLF IN CHIEFS CLOTHING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Feb. 12, 2023: Super Bowl Sunday. The Chiefs are playing the Philadelphia Eagles for all the marbles. We hang out with Babudar in a hotel room as he watches the game on TV, wearing a shirt bearing the likeness of Chiefs superstar quarterback Patrick Mahomes and an ankle monitor. He seems more worked up about the game than the fact that heâs facing a cumulative 350 years in prison for 19 counts of armed robbery for snatching $846,000 from banks and allegedly laundering $1 million â so thereâs no questioning his true fandom, and anyone who invests a bit too much of themselves in the success of a sports team (guilty!) can relate, because when YOUR TEAM is playing, the rest of the world just drops away for a couple of hours.
Anyway. Now we jump back to Dec., 2022. We hear 911 audio from a bank employee in Bixby, Oklahoma and watch police bodycam footage outlining a chase. Babudar held up a credit union and took off on a bicycle, and eventually was apprehended on a suburban street with a backpack full of cash and a bb gun. Who is this guy? Just ask a bunch of lovable weirdos who paint themselves red every Sunday during football season, or host obsessive Chiefs podcasts, or hop in their Chiefs-themed party buses and tailgate their asses off. They know him as Chiefsaholic, the guy in the wolf costume who turns up at every game and posts crazy memes and fan videos on twitter to tens of thousands of followers. We meet one fan who says she couldnât wait to see his pregame video post every gameday. Everybody knew Chiefsaholic, that he was a gregarious personality who hated hated hated the Las Vegas Raiders, but nobody really knew who he was. When his Twitter account went silent in Dec. of 2022, and he didnât show up at games, people got worried. Was he sick? Was he dead? Was he (cough) in jail?
At this point, the doc starts filling in some of Babudarâs biography. Heâs homeless, living out of his car. His father abandoned his family, and he and his brother ended up being taken away from his mother, who committed many petty crimes. His criminal record included a handful of misdemeanors for theft. And he was a serial gambler. One Chiefs fan tells a story of how Babudar bet $80,000 on a game, lost, and didnât seem to be bothered by it. Now we meet Michael Lloyd, the bail bondsman who read Babudarâs story of childhood hardship and posts his $80,000 bail â the family stole to feed themselves, Lloyd says, justifying his decision, although itâs worth noting something not mentioned in the film, namely, that a bail bondsman makes a percentage of the bail amount, so he stood to score a solid payday for springing Babudar.
This catches us up to Babudar in the hotel room watching the Super Bowl with more than just his happiness at stake â we learn he stands to score $155,000 because, prior to the season and his arrest, he bet on the Chiefs winning the Super Bowl and Mahomes being named MVP. Itâs no secret that both of those things happened. And this is when Lloyd starts to sweat heavily beneath his pasted-on toupee. A guy facing a zillion criminal charges with a pocketful of cash is what you call a flight risk. And if a client bolts, the bail bondsman becomes a bounty hunter, and is on the hook for the $80k and at threat of losing his license if he doesnât haul in the fugitive. And bolt is exactly what Babudar does.Â
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Chiefsaholic is like the documentary How to Rob a Bank crossed with Patton Oswalt-plays-a-toxic-New-York-Giants-fan fiction film Big Fan.
Performance Worth Watching: Instead of highlighting what a slippery weirdo Babudarâs lawyer is, letâs acknowledge Payton Garcia, the Iowa credit union teller who gamely and confidently represents all the people the robber traumatized by pointing a gun at them.
Memorable Dialogue: The cop who nabbed Babudar, L. Sanchez, rubbed it in: âIâm a Raiders fan,â Sanchez said. âA Raiders fan just arrested you.â
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Many true crime docs tend to sensationalize their stories, but this one doesnât need to. Itâs pretty sensational on its own, and Sires capitalizes on its twists and turns, shifting from following Babudar to being embedded with Lloyd as the bail bondsman, with a good chunk of change on the line, hunts his bounty. Lloyd tails Babudarâs mother and brother, who are also homeless and living out of a car, waiting for them to leave the vehicle so he can tag it with a tracking device or search through their trash for clues. (A weird sideplot almost emerges here, as Lloyd and Sires fail to suss out why Babudarâs family members visit various Targets and WalMarts so frequently; Lloyd finds return receipts in their garbage, leading one to assume that theyâre perpetrating some petty fraud.)
So Chiefsaholic isnât just a retrospective documentary full of talking heads and archival footage â Sires renders it visually and dramatically dynamic, mixing in Lloydâs on-location stakeouts (Dylan is present when Lloyd finds Babudarâs abandoned ankle monitor in the hotel room), reenactments and police footage. Itâs tense and fascinating, and worries that the film wouldnât justify its two-hour runtime were unfounded.
Thematically, the story is quite the rich milieu: The portrait of extreme fandom doesnât tell the whole story, but part of Babudarâs motive to rob banks surely had something to do with it; his gambling (which Babudar calls âan addictionâ at one point) and family history play significant parts too. Social media toxicity is part of the filmâs narrative, as Babudarâs online admirers leapt to defend him despite his fairly cut-and-dried guilt. Dylan also lucks into a subplot about the questionable ethics of bail bondsmen who stand to capitalize on springing volatile criminals from jail, although they do assume significant risk. And just when the doc risks becoming a sympathetic platform for Babudar, the other shoe drops and weâre subject to Garciaâs story of the emotional trauma she suffered; the mother of two feared for her life during the robbery, and couldnât return to work afterward, a firsthand account that immediately punctures the flimsy and desperate defense put forth by Babudarâs lawyer, who insists that ânobody was hurtâ during the robberies. This is a fascinating, well-constructed documentary.
Our Call: Chiefsaholic is such an excellent film, it doesnât deserve to be lumped in with the rest of the true crime dreck out there. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Chiefsaholic: A Wolf in Chiefs Clothing’ on Amazon Prime Video, a Fascinating True Crime Doc About a Bank Robbing Football Superfan appeared first on Decider.
