One of the things I like doing when I teach my students about good or bad sources is to point out how inherently unreliable online polls can be. My go-to example is the Discovery Channel’s 2005 mini-series The Greatest American. That series asked people to go online and select the greatest Americans throughout the country’s 200+ year history, after which the top 100 choices were featured on the show with a special mention for the top 25. That seemed to largely lead to some, let’s say, interesting choices. Many of the choices trended towards people still alive at the time of the survey or a large number of celebrities who died around the time of the survey. That, I figure, is why Ronald Reagan, having just died, got the #1 spot over the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr, or (my personal pick who came in at #5) Ben Franklin. That said, I did tend to note that of the athletes selected, the only one I thought worth listing was Muhammad Ali. And yet, one time I said that, I still had a student, one far too young to remember the Vietnam War or even possibly the 20th century itself, decry Ali as a draft dodger.
That says a kind of man Ali was that he could still make people mad about his words and actions long after he’d more or less retired from the spotlight. So, before it left Netflix, I checked out the biopic starring Will Smith.
The movie opens with Smith’s Ali in the ring as he wins the championship for the first time, this time against Sonny Liston. He prevails in the ring, but his problems outside of it are only just beginning. He no longer wants to be known as Cassius Clay Jr, and a lot of people, not just white people, aren’t willing to accommodate him there. During the course of the movie, he has to deal with the assassination of his estranged friend Malcolm X (Mario Van Peebles), various marriages that often end when he feels like it, and his decision not to go to fight the Vietnam War. Through it all, Ali is basically a fighter to the end, where one who not let anyone tell him what to do. Whether its his own father (Giancarlo Esposito), TV reporter Howard Cosell (Jon Voight), or just whatever woman he’s currently married to that he can’t or won’t stay with, he’ll be fighting.
That’s more or less the movie. The film opens with Ali’s winning the championship against Lister and ends with his winning it back against George Foreman. And for all that he does a lot of fighting, there are levels to it. Arguably, his sparring with Cosell is more playful than anything else, suggesting that Cosell alone managed to gain and keep Ali’s respect in a very mutual manner. It helps that Cosell seems to be one of the few people in the movie outside his inner circle that doesn’t object to calling Ali by his preferred name. Ali is a fighter. The world is his ring.
While the occasional choppiness of the narrative as it bounced around the various points of Ali’s life didn’t always work for me, what did work was Will Smith’s portrayal. Smith, as an actor, sometimes seems to coast on his considerable onscreen charm. Whether it’s an action movie or a comedy, Smith often seems to be playing, well, some variation on the Fresh Prince. That’s often fine, but it helps when he actually goes a bit against type and plays someone very different. That was the case in King Richard, and it is very much the case here. Yes, his Muhammad Ali carries a certain level of playfulness in his demeanor, and Smith is still very charming since, arguably, he can’t really turn that off, and heck, Ali’s public rhyming and trash talk certainly works coming out of Smith’s mouth given his start as a rapper, but there’s still an aura to his Ali that is a very different sort of character than what his fans may have been used to, and I always like it when an actor stretches his range a bit.
Worth noting are the great fight scenes. Smith packed on weight and trained in boxing to play the part right, and it shows. But the thing I noted the most was as much as Smith was in obvious excellent shape and heavier than he normally is, he was still dwarfed by the other actors playing boxers in those scenes. That sort of thing, probably reflective on reality, actually made Ali’s victories all the more impressive. I don’t know a whole lot about sports in general, and my knowledge of athletes’ lives is often minimal, but I did get the impression that this was the sort of man who never backed down from a fight and never let anyone else try to tell him what to do. Quite frankly, that more or less matches what little I did know, and the movie, if not exactly a celebration of his victories, was at least a showcase for Smith, director Michael Mann, and a nice character study of a man who, apparently, can still raise controversy decades after the fact.
Grade: B-
EDITED TO ADD: OK, so, I wrote this review before last night’s Academy Awards show. I don’t think much of the Oscars. They often go to movies that don’t seem to deserve them, passing over better choices, and the show itself is Hollywood patting itself on the back around a lot of bad jokes. So, yeah, I didn’t know when I wrote this that sometime between when I hit “schedule” and when the review would go live that Will Smith would smack Chris Rock on live television. And…I don’t really have anything to say to that, but given this is the Ali review starring Smith just after he won Best Actor for the aforementioned King Richard, I’ll just say that it was a coincidence that this all happened and leave it at that.
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