Film

Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee

Name: Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee
Genre: Documentary, Crime
Released: 2022
Cast: John McAfee

A portrait of tech entrepreneur John McAfee's descent into paranoia, excess, and international fugitive status. Director Charlie Russell pieces together archive footage, interviews, and McAfee's own phone recordings into a darkly compelling chronicle of a man who built an empire, lost his mind, and fled across Central America pursued by ghosts both real and imagined. Mesmerizing and deeply unsettling.

TMDb rating

3.1

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you enjoy true-crime documentaries built from the subject's own camera, where a flamboyant, unreliable character talks freely and the viewer does the doubting.

Skip it if the material is mostly self-mythologizing archive footage with little outside verification, so if you want a rigorous investigation rather than one man's version of events, this will frustrate you.

What it asks of you: Roughly an hour and three-quarters of raw archive footage and interviews, with a loose, restless rhythm that rewards staying alert to who is telling the story.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley2019

Alex Gibney's forensic dissection of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos reveals how charisma, ambition, and tech industry credulity can enable elaborate fraud. The structural parallels to McAfee's rise and fall are instructive and chilling.

But It's primarily a story of deception told through talking heads and documents. If you need narrative momentum or visual spectacle, the accumulation of evidence may feel slow.

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley poster

Fyre2019

A masterclass in how delusion scales. Billy McFarland's Fyre Festival collapse mirrors McAfee's trajectory—both men built empires on hype and belief rather than substance, then spiraled publicly and catastrophically.

But The comedy can feel like punching down at a deeply unstable person. Some viewers find the tone overly celebratory about failure.

Dirty Money2018

This Netflix anthology series profiles financial criminals and tech moguls who weaponized systems for personal gain. The first episode on a Malaysian kleptocrat shares McAfee's themes of wealth, paranoia, and jurisdictional escape.

But Individual episodes vary in depth and compulsion. You're banking on finding the right one to pull you through several hours of crime procedural.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Anarchists2022

Both are chronicles of tech pioneers whose libertarian worldviews and distrust of authority led them to jurisdictions beyond law, where paranoia became the governing logic.

An HBO documentary series about cryptocurrency visionaries who fled to Puerto Rico to build a libertarian paradise, only to be consumed by paranoia, betrayal, and violence. It's McAfee's spiritual successor—same tech mythology, same collapse into chaos, real-time documentation of how ideology curdles into madness.

But Newer, less curated, sometimes meandering. Some episodes feel unfocused and the cast is harder to invest in than one charismatic villain.

The Two Popes2019

A intimate conversation between two men at crossroads, weighing power, legacy, and spiritual reckoning. McAfee's obsession with his own myth echoes in this meditation on how powerful men justify themselves.

But It's a slow, dialogue-driven film about theology and bureaucracy. If you're here for velocity and spectacle, this will feel glacial.

Summer with the gentleman2019

Guy Ritchie's maze of criminal enterprise, paranoia, and people performing confidence for survival. It captures the fever dream energy of McAfee's later years—everyone suspects everyone, reality bends, the joke is on you.

But The overlapping timelines and rapid-fire dialogue can feel exhausting rather than clever. It may come across as style over substance.

McMafia2018

A taut thriller about a young man drawn into transnational organized crime. It shares McAfee's exploration of how jurisdictions become meaningless to those with money and desperation, and how paranoia becomes currency.

But The protagonist is less compelling than the systems he moves through. Some feel it prioritizes intrigue over character depth.

The Wolf of Wall Street2013

Scorsese's portrait of a man intoxicated by wealth, privilege, and his own mythology. McAfee and Jordan Belfort are spiritual cousins—both built empires, both believed their own press, both crashed hard.

But At three hours, it's seductive in the way its subject is seductive. The film doesn't always critique the excess it depicts, which can feel morally ambiguous in ways that frustrate rather than provoke.

The Act of Killing2012

Both use the subject's own recordings and performative instinct to reveal what happens when someone becomes untethered from consequence and reality. Both ask: what does a person do when the camera is always on?

An extraordinary Indonesian documentary where mass murderers reenact their crimes as entertainment, asking themselves and us what it means to perform atrocity. Like McAfee's footage, it's an unbearable mirror—a man unable to see himself clearly, the camera as confession.

But It documents real genocide. The subject matter is profoundly disturbing. Watching people perform casual cruelty is not entertainment, and the film does not let you pretend it is.

The Man Without a Face1993

Both feature men of considerable intellect and charisma whose isolation and resentment of institutional authority drive them toward increasingly paranoid and harmful behaviors. Both explore how brilliance without empathy becomes predatory.

A largely forgotten Mel Gibson film about a reclusive, scarred man teaching a boy to break into prestigious schools. Tonally and thematically it sits in McAfee's chaos—obsession, mentorship twisted into manipulation, the performance of authority by someone unmoored from normal social contract.

But It's a '90s thriller with a dated sensibility. The pacing is methodical and the plot turns are mild by modern standards. Gibson's subsequent persona casts a shadow.