Always glad to see Elon Musk pummeled, of course, as he is in Alex Gibney’s documentary Musk, now playing in theaters. The film sounds the alarm over this right-wing trillionaire tech bastard, which can’t be done too early or too often. But there’s a problem when even I, a fervent, long-term Musk hater, get exhausted, then irritated, then fed up by this film long before its grueling four-hour running time is over.

For me, the burning question quickly became: Who is this film for? What’s the intended audience for this thing?

Gibney’s huge, heavy-handed disemboweling of Musk, clumsily wielding an axe rather than a scalpel, was immediately identified as “a hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours” by Musk himself, warning off his obsessed fans, who’ll obviously be skipping the film. It’s an indication of Musk’s essential stupidity — his cluelessness about everything except how to generate profits, particularly off his own repeated business failures — that he keeps obsessively commenting on this film on social media, thus doing its publicity work for the PR team presumably getting paid to do the same job. Some curiosity-seekers with time to kill might head to the multiplex, thanks to the many free, self-defeating, Elon Musk–generated promo tweets.