William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill review – captain’s log is short on detail

Documentary, basically an extended ‘audience with’, is less revealing than Star Trek devotees might wish but he’s a charismatic raconteur

He has lived long and prospered. Now 93 years old (though looking like a slip of a lad of 70), William Shatner shares his wit and wisdom in a new documentary that is basically an audience with the great man. Sitting alone in a huge darkened warehouse space, he rambles on uninterrupted. It’s perhaps less fun than you might have hoped for, though Shatner is undoubtedly charismatic, and a pretty decent raconteur. He’s often entertaining, if not always necessarily in the way he intended. Here he is on acting, explaining that if he could win any award it would be for “keeping my inner child alive”. He’s deadly serious, I think.

He speaks like this, with a spoofy quality that is very easy to poke fun at. But Shatner is not completely un-self-aware. He’s made a late career out of playing the part of William Shatner, the man with a famously inflated ego. There’s a terrific clip from 2005 of him presenting a lifetime achievement award to Star Wars creator George Lucas. The joke is that Shatner’s got the wrong end of the stick – thinks he’s at a Star Trek convention. Two stormtroopers march him off stage. So he is in on the joke – at least sometimes.