“The King of Kong” is a documentary about trying to break and/or hold the world record at Donkey Kong. It stars two guys: the upstart and the champion. The upstart is Steve Wiebe, a guy who looks like he’s finished second so many times that the fecal matter he crapped in his pants when he lost that little league baseball game when he was eight is still clinging to his asshairs and giving him the itchies. The champion is Billy Mitchell, a guy whose wardrobe and attitude scream “world’s biggest prick” so loud that you can see the sound waves reverberating off his Teflon demeanor.

Seriously, Steve Wiebe might just be the nicest guy in the world and with each roadblock he seems to hit both in life and along the way in his efforts to reach Mitchell’s world record, you just want to reach through the tv and give the guy a hug. Of course, crossed with that emotion is the desire to scream at him to find a hobby worth a shit. Billy Mitchell, on the other hand, is an assfuck of such colossal assfuckedness that I seriously considered traveling to Florida and kicking his ass. This is just one of those guys who you’d like to see wailing at the end of a beatdown.

Caught in the middle is Walter Day, who’s the official referee of some kind of world gaming association housed at www.twingalaxies.com. Walter seems like a decent enough guy, though it’s apparent from the beginning that he’s caught up in the cult of Billy Mitchell, whereby anybody who’s a bigger loser than Mitchell follows Mitchell around like a lost puppy and listens to anything he says as though it was the word of God. Two other such men in the movie are Brian Kuh (who might honestly be the most pathetic human being I’ve ever seen, not because of looks or physique or anything like that, but because of his ridiculous devotion to a complete prick), who’s desperate for his own Donkey Kong high score and Steve Sanders, Mitchell’s friend, back from the days when Mitchell outed Steve as a fraud.

While the movie is like watching a starving cat chase a piece of cheese attached to a string (Steve is chasing the cheese and Mitchell is pulling the string), it’s also a tale of good guys finishing first. Steve doesn’t necessarily finish first in score (check Twin Galaxies and the DVD extras for the full story after the film ends), but what he does do, through effort and decency, is to get Billy Mitchell’s putz army to realize that Billy Mitchell’s resounding prickitude has rubbed off on them like dye. Watching both Walter and Steve sort of realize that Billy Mitchell has been doing nothing more than shitting all over them is semi-satisfying.

Undoubtedly, the movie will appeal to those four or five people who care who has the world record score on Donkey Kong.