'Extraordinary Life' review: Unsatisfying Ben Dunne profile too ...

When someone has lived their life as infamously as the late businessman and former chief executive of retail giant Dunnes Stores, who died of a heart attack in Dubai last November, a filmmaker would pull a muscle if they tried to put too much of a positive spin on all of it.

The documentary dutifully chronicles the highs and lows of Dunne’s life and career. There was the spectacular business success in the 1980s when he expanded the Dunnes Stores empire.

There was the trauma of his kidnapping by the Provisional IRA in 1981. A ransom was eventually paid, despite the government’s attempts to thwart it.

There was the fall from grace and ousting from the family firm in the 1990s after a meltdown in a Florida hotel room involving cocaine and sex workers.

There were the tribunal revelations of financial chicanery and corruption relating to former taoiseach Charles Haughey and minister Michael Lowry.

Finally, there was Dunne’s unlikely business rebirth as the owner of a chain of gyms.

It’s not that anything is left out, but the documentary’s failing lies in how little it does with some of it.

Despite contributions by seasoned journalists Sam Smyth, Justine McCarthy, Conor Pope, Cliff Taylor and Mick Clifford, all of whom have written – often quite mercilessly – about Dunne over the years, there’s a sense that the film is not going in as hard on its subject as it might.

Perhaps it’s the old “never speak ill of the dead” syndrome. Or maybe, less than a year after Dunne’s death, it’s still too soon for a properly critical assessment.

Joe Duffy, in particular, seems to have a soft spot for Dunne, chuckling as he recalls some of the dafter business ideas he came up with post-Dunnes Stores (there’s a clip of Dunne in ebullient mood on Duffy’s short-lived 2007 consumer show Highly Recommended).

There are also clips of Dunne appearing on the Pat Kenny era Late Late Show, Tubridy Tonight and Ryan Confidential, in each case charming the hosts by using his past transgressions as a comedy stick to beat himself with.

Looking at him, it was fear, it was terror, he was frothing at the mouth

This comparatively soft approach, allied with much archive footage we’ve seen before, sometimes makes it look like the longest-ever episode of Reeling in the Years.

Opening with Dunne solemnly intoning, “What’s gone is gone, my past is my past, I don’t think about it,” the documentary jumps between the 80s, the 90s and the more recent past.

Inevitably perhaps, it’s the juiciest part – the Florida incident from 1992, which electrified a media unused to such a public figure being embroiled in such a lurid episode – that provides the starting point.

Dunne had been in a swanky hotel room with sex worker Denise Wojcik (seen in an archive interview for Today Tonight), the two of them snorting cocaine through €100 bills in the bath, when he freaked out and threatened to throw himself from the balcony.

“I’m just gonna jump and I’m gonna take you with me,” he told then Orange County deputy sheriff Stan Spanich, the man who talked him down.

"Looking at him, it was fear, it was terror, he was frothing at the mouth,” Spanich says here.

In an extraordinary moment, Spanich chokes up at the memory of just how bad a state Dunne – who had to be hogtied and carried away – was in.

What’s missing from the documentary is a truly strong dissenting voice. Dunne’s ruthlessness as a businessman is alluded to – his undercutting of rivals’ bread prices threatened to close bakeries and put hundreds out of work – but never really explored.

The Dunnes Stores staff strike of 1984, sparked when two young checkout workers, IDATU union members, refused to handle South African fruit, is covered in only superficial detail.

Dunne was on the wrong side of history, yet dug in. The strike ended, almost three years later, only when Ireland became the first Western country to ban South African imports.

There’s a clip of Dunne apologising to one of the strikers on Liveline 24 years later. “You cannot defend the indefensible,” he says.

That was too little too late. This unsatisfying documentary is too little too early.