Ali
Review
by : Eric Barker
Starring:
Will Smith (Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali), Jon
Voight (Howard Cosell), Mario Van Peebles (Malcom X)
Directed by: Michael Mann
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Disappointing, dull, and downright lazy film biography
of world heavyweight champion Muhammed Ali, one of the previous
century’s most charismatic, and enigmatic, sports figures.
Ali’s
turbulent life should have made exceptional cinematic material,
defining as it did so many key elements of the African-American
experience in an era of extreme social change. But in the
hands of director Michael Mann -- a sometimes brilliant, sometimes
frustratingly shallow moviemaker -- the swirl and tumult of
Ali’s life becomes mere surface gloss for a Cliff’s Notes
recital of the main events, from the boxer’s explosive emergence
into American consciousness during his 1964 title bout with
Sonny Liston, to his extraordinary “comeback” ten years later,
in a punishing match with George Foreman promoted as “The
Rumble in the Jungle,” one of the great moments in boxing
history. In between, Ali publicly battled institutional racism
and religious oppression, was both an intimate friend, and
then an ideological foe, of Malcom X, and fought his own internal
struggles with the leadership of the Nation of Islam. During
the sixties and seventies he led a quintessential American
life, constantly trapped between his public and private personae,
and a quintessentially heroic life that is still going on,
a true warrior grappling with his own identity as a citizen
and as a human being. Ali’s life plainly bears all the marks
of a first-class modern epic; all it needed to make a great
movie was a filmmaker interested in telling such a tale.
But watching
Michael Mann’s Ali, it’s nearly impossible to tell
what the filmmaker was interested in. Opening with a stylish
but indecipherable sequence that cross-cuts between a young
Ali in-training and a nightclub concert by Sam Cooke (whose
life, incidentally, would also make a good movie), the film
never goes any deeper, reconstructing lots of events without
connecting them to each other in any meaningful way, occasionally
interrupting their flow with another musical sequence that
seems to mean something, but mostly doesn’t. The film displays
a powerful reluctance to enter Ali’s complex psyche, or to
explain any of his actions, as if all that was just old fashioned
stuff that movies don’t really need to do any more. Finally,
we leave Ali without being told why he was supposedly
such a great boxer (he was a giant of a man who moved with
a seemingly impossible combination of grace and lightning
reflexes, and he was a tactical genius), why he converted
to Islam against the wishes of his family when he was still
very young, why he decided to be a boxer at all, what his
record was as an Olympian before turning pro, why he broke
with Malcom X and how he felt afterward (he still regrets
it), and why, for God’s sake, he had so much trouble staying
with one woman (besides, as Ali would put it, being so pretty
himself).
Will Smith
obviously did his homework -- he moves, talks and looks like
Ali at every moment; unfortunately the screenwriters -- and
there were many (too many) -- didn’t work as hard as he did,
and gave him little to do once he showed up in character.
Meanwhile, Jon Voight gives another hilariously dead-on impersonation
as a famous personality (he also played FDR in Pearl Harbor
earlier this year, also for naught), portraying celebrity
journalist Howard Cosell, who conspired with Ali to form one
of the great comedy teams of sports television. The Ali-Cosell
relationship, for that matter, is the only relationship in
the film given adequate illumination, two fine actors taking
over the movie now and then to give us a glimpse of what could
have been.
Notes:
RENT:
When We Were Kings (1996), Leon Gast’s triumphant documentary
about “The Rumble in the Jungle.“ It’s an insightful and gripping
labor of love, and it stars the man himself, with guest appearances
by Norman Mailer, George Plimpton and Spike Lee.
COMPARE
a couple of superb biographical films that show how it’s done:
Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), probably the ultimate
film biography of a boxer; and Spike Lee’s Malcom X (1992),
which gets all the details right, public and private, inside
and out, of a great African-American's journey through the
same era.
WHEN HE
IS GOOD...: Michael Mann (b. 1943) is a former director of
commercials and prize-winning shorts who created the style-over-reality
TV hit Miami Vice (1984-89). Every now and then he
makes a good film, almost in spite of his impulse toward empty,
pretty pictures. Cf. The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
and The Insider (1999)
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