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The Champ is here, the Champ is here and I just don’t get it. What was all the hoopla about Muhammad Ali, the world’s greatest boxer? Why was he the greatest boxer? If he was so great, the film Ali, directed by Michael Mann sure as hell did not explain that or tell that story. The story told in this picture gave me a completely different picture of this boxer, the image that I grew up with. My childhood memory of Ali, was of a great boxer who never lost a fight and chanted cute poems like floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee, nobody fights like Muhammad Ali. But in this film he does lose and he is not so great. He is a womanizer, but because of his religion he marries these poor girls and when they do something wrong or don’t follow his version of his Islam religion he leaves them and moves on. He doesn’t want to go to war but not because he doesn’t want to travel 10,000 miles to kill other poor people but because he doesn’t want to lose that time in the ring. They don’t come right out and say it but that is how it is presented. This is not a great man, a great boxer or even a decent American Citizen. This film starring Will Smith (Enemy of the State) as Ali, did a great disservice to the image of Muhammad Ali. If this was how he truly was then that is too bad that they felt the need to shatter the image of a lot of children’s hero. The beginning of the film was difficult to follow because it jumps around from decade to decade. We learn Cassius Clay Sr. (Giancarlo Esposito of Monkey Bone) painted blue eyed, blonde hair Jesuses in the whiteman’s church to give his family a good home and food. We see the young Cassius Clay going to the back of the bus and we see him attending Islam services listening to the teaching of Malcolm X (Mario Van Peebles). We see the church and its leaders control every move of Ali and abandon him when he is down. While Ali is spending a fortune in legal fees and can’t fight because they took his license the church expels him, but the second he is getting back on his feet (without their help) they are there again wanting a piece of that gravy train and he lets them back. He abandoned his friend Malcolm because the church expelled him for speaking his mind about the church bombing in Alabama that killed those four young girls. He made his first wife Sonji Roi (real life wife of Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith) become a Muslim and when she didn’t fit the part he sent her away and married Belinda Boyd (Nona M. Gaye) the mother of his children and she stood by Ali while he was broke and out of boxing, but when she spoke her mind in Africa he sent her home and moved on to Veronica Porsche (Michael Michele). The film basically left off with the fight Rumble in the Jungle and briefly covered his other fights. Nothing to indicate he was any more special than any other boxer that won a fight. The only remarkable item this film brings away is his friendship and unique relationship with Howard Cosell (Jon Voight of Pearl Harbor). The whole concept of a film about Muhammad Ali is a great idea but how they went about this film is a travesty. The writing by Gregory Allen Howard jumped around so much it only told a partial story and left out the great details of Ali’s life and left us with a negative portrait. It showed many glimpses of the instability of the sixties but didn’t touch on the real story. It showed long drawn out fight scenes that didn’t suggest he was a great boxer just a boxer. The film never mentioned his Gold Medal at the Olympics- something I even knew about and that was almost a decade before I was even born. There is just too many things that were done wrong with this film that it would take pages to mention. The acting at least was about a good as you could expect with the material given. It is just a shame that they had such a promising storyline of a boxer the world had come to know as the greatest and trivialized the story to a washed up, bigoted, womanizing, draft dodging, cultist boxer. Others in this movie were, Ron Silver, Mykelti Williamson (Three Kings) as Don King, Jeffrey Wright of Shaft and Joe Morton of Bounce. The terrible biography done on Ali’s life, the poor camera shots, the bad direction, the incoherent jumps in time and the lousy boxing chorography gives this Michael Mann film a two on the About-Movies.com scale. Ding ding.
Last updated: Thursday, March 20, 2008 02:49:14 AM Click Here to get back into frames.
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