Summary
Mike Epps tries to get personal in Delusional, an almost full-career retrospective that moves like lightning, but it’s a mixed bag overall.
You know where you stand with a Mike Epps special. He has been around for long enough that you know what to expect, and he has never really failed to deliver it, even if he has pretty consistently failed to deliver anything else. Mike Epps is, for better and worse, Mike Epps and nothing more, and in Delusional, his fifth Netflix special — others include Only One Mike, Indiana Mike, and Ready to Sell Out — he performs precisely as advertised.
The pacing is all over the place in this hour. You can divide it roughly into two sections. The first half is a rapid-fire, scattershot medley of tiny bits touching on various issues, some of them highly relevant, either intentionally or, thanks to recent events involving immigration officers, accidentally. The more curious second half is a sped-up career retrospective, charting Epps’s introduction to comedy, his transition into movies, and what is very close to a straight-up list of every picture he ever starred in and who he worked with on the set.
Epps’s manic delivery both improves and hinders each section. It’s fun to see him touch on Trump and ICE, and on P-Diddy’s freaky charges, but he doesn’t linger on either beyond a gag or two. Whether that’s out of fear of being too political, or too “current”, or simply a consequence of having too much to get through, it’s difficult to say. Epp’s long-time celebrity status would have probably provided an interesting angle on the Diddy stuff, but “I was never invited to the parties” is about all we get.
In a longer bit about women and how they differ — rich and poor, black and white, and so on — there’s more meat, but like everything else, any insight is surface-level at best. It looks like we’re going somewhere with an explanation of how a trip to Africa led him to investigate his own ancestry, but it never goes any deeper. I would have liked to hear more about that story.
It’s clear that the selling point of Mike Epps: Delusional is the back half, a fairly comprehensive summary of how a drug charge led to a career in comedy. Sure, the “comedy saved my life” angle is a bit played out, but truth is truth, and you can feel Epps’s coming through when he recounts these stories, some of which are deeply personal and at one point move him to tears. It’s a brief snippet of genuine emotion that feels alarming in its suddenness, but this doesn’t last either.
The tail end of this stuff feels a bit too name-droppy for my tastes. I can appreciate anecdotes about Next Friday, but the list of movies and co-stars that follows it feels slightly self-serving. It’s building to a point, to be fair. In the closing moments, Epps states that this entire journey was defined by his delusion and that everyone should embrace being delusional in pursuit of their goals. It’s a nice idea, and a good way to wrap this whole section in some kind of theme, but it’s pretty token in its execution. This is hardly a thesis.
It is, though, a Mike Epps special. If you like them, it’s a good bet you’ll like Delusional, since it’s Epps to the core; his years spent squatting in rich white people’s houses, his twenty-year sobriety, his immovable place in mainstream and independent comedy. All of that’s here, as it should be, in exactly the form you’d expect.
After Netflix’s first foray into comedy in 2026, Marcello Hernandez: American Boy, Delusional feels like a nice counterpoint, a legend in the comedy scene recounting his own story just a couple of weeks after a newcomer shared his. On the surface, there’s a world of difference between the two. But maybe the delusion is what unites them. Thankfully, there’s room for both.
