SUMMARY:

ALI takes us through ten years in the life of the former Cassius Clay, beginning with his capture of the heavyweight championship of the world from Sonny Liston and concluding with his regaining of the title in Zaire, after the Supreme Court overturned his conviction for draft evasion.

STEVE SAYS:

Much has been written about the consistency with which the Motion Picture Academy seems to be unable to find any person of color worthy of being honored by an Oscar. This year, they need look no further than Will Smith and his towering portrayal of Muhammad Ali. However, the film itself is wildly out of balance because, as solid as Smith is in the role, he “floats like a butterfly” high above a pedestrian script that fails on almost every level. In fact, just about everything good that I have to say about ALI is specifically about Smith.

The depth of the former rapper’s acting talent was only hinted at early in his film career in Fred Schepisi’s screen version of SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION. From that point, Smith vaulted to stardom on the strength of his considerable charisma in such crowd-pleasers as INDEPENDENCE DAY and MEN IN BLACK. Finally, ALI gives us a good look at just how deep those talent waters flow and it is considerable. Smith obviously gave his all to the preparation and execution of the role; no easy task when one considers that he is portraying one of the best known figures of the twentieth century.

First, Smith packed on thirty pounds of solid muscle to more closely resemble The Champ, an accomplishment aided in part by the pinning back of those trade-mark jug-ears of his. Then he learned to box. In fact, he not only learned to box but he learned to box like Muhammad Ali, a feat which most professional fighters are unable to duplicate. That kind of dedication to craft has been seldom seen since Robert DeNiro played a fighter from another era, Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese’s RAGING BULL. There isn’t a moment in the film when Smith doesn’t appear to completely inhabit the character of America’s greatest living fighter. To say that Will Smith has come a long way since “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” is the understatement of this or any other century.

Now, about that pesky script; it -- well, I’ll just say it, it just lays there. The problem is that, while it covers what is undeniably the most dramatic decade in Muhammad Ali’s life, it doesn’t go any deeper than a surface recitation of the events that we all know already. Want to know what happened to his first marriage? Well, you’d better not go out for Gummi Worms or you’ll miss that part of his life completely. But the fabled “Rumble in the Jungle” match in Zaire, in which Ali regains his title from George Foreman, takes up the last half hour of this over-long opus. And since we all know how that match turned out, the filmmakers efforts to imbue the sequence with a sense of tension and suspense is totally hollow. There’s really nothing I can say that will spoil the plot for you if you’re over twenty-five, since you lived through it. Ali’s Muslim mentor, Malcolm X? He gets shot. That pesky draft-evasion conviction? Ali beats it. Throughout the movie, I kept silently imploring the filmmakers to tell me something I didn’t already know about Muhammad Ali. Alas, they didn’t. The only mystery at all is why it took five credited writers (and God knows how many uncredited ones) to whip up this thin soufflé.

Smith is supported by a cast of fine actors who aren’t challenged in the slightest by the material. Jon Voight is hidden behind a grotesque layer of latex and a dime-store toupee as he portrays legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell. His performance rarely rises above the level of impersonation, albeit a highly competent one. Voight never shows us much of a real human being, but in fairness to the talented actor, the script doesn’t really afford him any opportunity to do that.

Ron Silver is virtually wasted in the seriously underdeveloped role of Ali’s dedicated trainer, Angelo Dundee. Indeed, given the considerable influence that Dundee had in the great fighter’s life, you’d think he would have been a major character. But while Dundee appears throughout the movie, he remains a vague and distant figure.

Michael Mann’s sense of the visual doesn’t fail him, but he really needed to trim at least a half hour from the film, much of which could have come from the overlong opening sequence and the equally overwrought roadwork section of the Zaire scenes.

Will Smith deserves five kernels for his knock-out performance. But alas, the rest of the movie drags it down to only three.

* * * *

PATTY SAYS:

Okay, if you want to go see a biography, you'll be disappointed in ALI. You'll come away knowing little more about the colorful Mr. Ali than if you did before you dropped eight bucks on this flick. Chick flick? Nofriggin' way. There is more romance in a CK One commercial. If you're into boxing films, you might enjoy some of the action. Personally, I get a little nauseated when I compress hamburger patties. I'm not into boxing or other non-sexual contact sports. I spent the fight scenes in ALI examining the creases in my palm. Morality play? There were a few moments when you cheer Ali's insistence in playing it his way. "I don't have to be what you want me to be; I'm free to be what I want." Action thriller? Well, even I knew that Ali would triumph over Foreman. In short, I think the script never decided what it wanted to say. It shows. The film comes off as a montage of disjointed and only mildly interesting anecdotes based on a decade of Ali's life.

Here's where Steve and I are going to disagree. I thought Will Smith was great in this role; I just couldn't mentally morph him into Ali. The public Ali that I remember was himself a characterization. His facial expression alone was enough to crack me up. During uncharacteristic voids in his spirited monologues, he'd do an occasional deadpan look at Cosell that was funnier than any of his one-liners. The chemistry between the two was entertaining without either uttering a word of scripted dialogue. I thought Smith was too low key to pull of a credible Ali. Of course, having said that, I wonder who could? Ali is Ali. Who among us can imitate someone who is so much his own person and is so in your face about it?

I thought Steve was irritatingly harsh with his treatment of Jon Voight. Plastic and a really bad toupee? That IS Cosell! I truly would not have recognized Voight had he not been credited. He didn't look much like Cosell either, but he had the voice and mannerisms down. Give the guy a little credit for rising above a real stinker of a script. He was one of the few entertaining aspects of this film.

I should have known this film wouldn't carry my interest in the first fifty (well, more like five, but it seemed like 50) minutes of the film. Mann felt compelled to interchange shots of Ali jogging with scenes of Sam Cooke in some juke joint makin' the chicks swoon. It was a long, long, segment. I kept thinking that the two scenes would tie in with one another at some point in the plot, but...it never happened. As a matter of fact, that's pretty much the flavor of the whole movie: scene after scene with no thematic interface.

The one bright spot for me was the cinematography. The film had some interesting visual artistic content that was engaging and unpredictable. The acting was solid, but let's not hand Mr. Smith the Oscar quite yet. The script was the "Rated-R-for-violence-and-language" version of "Green Eggs and Ham." You'd think with five writers on story and screenplay, among them they could come up with a plausible plan for condensing a decade of Mr. Ali's interesting life into something less mundane than what they gave us. In short, this film was a bungle in da jungle.

* * * *

January 5, 2002