Who Killed the Montreal Expos? 2025 Movie Review
Who Killed The Montreal Expos is not a great documentary. It’s too unfocused and scattered to come anywhere near approaching that territory. But it is just informative enough, and poignant enough in the endgame, to warrant a watch from baseball fans.
Basically, what director Jean-Francois Poisson does here is examine the reasons why the Montreal Expos Major League Baseball team (assembled in 1969) ultimately moved to Washington D. C. in 2005. The reasons are multiple: constant cash flow shortages, the Loria/Samson ownership fiasco, an inability to secure public funding for a new stadium, the 1994 MLB strike (upsetting the best season in Expos history), and the lack of a TV deal by the end are all mentioned.
Like I said, Who Killed the Montreal Expos is not in the upper-echelon of docs. In some part, this is because the fast-paced, quick-cutting style doesn’t really jive with baseball analysis. But the doc also is not nuanced enough in how it deals with the “first person sources”. It plays out rather predictably: of course Samson isn’t going to fully take credit for the demise of the Expos; of course Felipe Alou is going to come off as the sentimental hero; of course some of the minority stakeholders of the franchise are going to air sour grapes for how it all went down. This doc has its heroes and villains from the very beginning and the approach isn’t quite sophisticated enough to pry out the really interesting material.
That being said, I did learn a decent amount about the question the project proposes in its title. It’s certainly informative in that sense. Plus, the final 10-15 minutes are quite poignant (especially considering the up-and-down nature of the piece until that point) in showing how much the Expos are missed in Montreal. I had no idea fan conventions are still held for the franchise well into the 2020s.
So, while this doc’s scattershot execution largely exempts it from the top-notch star rankings, if you are a big enough Expos (or baseball-in-general) fan you’ll at very least learn a little bit and feel a little bit from Who Killed the Montreal Expos.
