In a sentenceTwo and a half hours of the loudest man in America, directed by a man who prefers silence
Miami, 1964. Cassius Clay (Will Smith) is training to fight Sonny Liston for a heavyweight title almost nobody thinks he can win. In his corner are trainer Angelo Dundee (Ron Silver), cornerman Drew ‘Bundini’ Brown (Jamie Foxx) and photographer Howard Bingham (Jeffrey Wright); at his shoulder, more quietly, is Malcolm X (Mario Van Peebles), who has brought him into the Nation of Islam. Broadcaster Howard Cosell (Jon Voight) baits him on television and gets baited back. Clay runs the streets at night with a police car trailing him, shouts down Liston at the weigh-in, wins the belt, and announces a new name, Muhammad Ali. He marries Sonji Roi (Jada Pinkett Smith), and almost at once the men around him begin to argue over who he belongs to.
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Michael Mann’s biopic opens with ten minutes as good as anything he has made, and Will Smith’s Ali is a real physical feat. But the film grows solemn and scattered in its middle hour, and the loudest man of his age keeps getting hushed.
Michael Mann’s film about Muhammad Ali takes ten years of the man’s life, from the first Sonny Liston fight in 1964 to a night in Kinshasa in 1974, and gives them 157 minutes. Mann wrote it with Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson and Eric Roth, from a story by Gregory Allen Howard, and between them they have made a serious, handsome, slow film about the least slow man of his century. It is good in long stretches and baggy in others. The first ten minutes are close to perfect, and nothing afterwards matches them.
Those ten minutes go like this. Sam Cooke sings on a small stage, sweating through his shirt. Cassius Clay runs through Miami at night with his hood up and a police car crawling along behind him. He hits the heavy bag; Malcolm X speaks at a lectern; the weigh-in looms. Emmanuel Lubezki lights the streets with nothing but the streetlamps and lets the faces fall half into shadow, and Mann cuts between the song and the running until they feel like the same thing. We were moved, and we had not expected to be moved by a boxing film’s warm-up.
Will Smith has put on the weight and found the voice, the Louisville singsong that rises at the end of every boast, and he has learned how Ali stood: hands low, chin up, leaning back from punches rather than slipping them. Lubezki shoots the boxing from inside the ropes, at shoulder height, with the camera moving as a third man in the ring might, and the punches land near enough that we flinched. The first Liston fight is the best of them. The weigh-in before it, with Smith shouting over Jamie Foxx’s shoulder as Drew ‘Bundini’ Brown feeds him lines, is the one time the film lets Ali be as funny as the man was. Smith is less sure in the quiet scenes, where he settles into a watchful stillness that belongs to Mann rather than to Ali.
Jon Voight, under a wig and a prosthetic jaw, plays Howard Cosell, and his scenes with Smith are the film’s running comedy, two men who need each other and will not say so. Foxx sweats and talks and is later, briefly, heartbreaking. Mario Van Peebles’s Malcolm X is still, courteous and the best written person in the film after Ali, and when he leaves the story the film loses some of its nerve. Jeffrey Wright, as the photographer Howard Bingham, has almost no lines and spends the film watching. Mykelti Williamson’s Don King arrives late and loud. The wives, Jada Pinkett Smith’s Sonji Roi, Nona Gaye’s Belinda and Michael Michele’s Veronica Porche, get a scene or two each, and marriages begin and end between fights.
The middle hour is the trouble. It covers the Nation of Islam, the draft and the years Ali was kept out of the ring, and Mann stages nearly all of it in dim rooms with men speaking low. Four editors are credited, Stephen E. Rivkin, William Goldenberg, Stuart Waks and Lynzee Klingman, and the film moves as if assembled by four people who agreed about the fights and not about the rest. Years pass under a caption, Joe Morton’s Chauncey Eskridge explains the legal case in a corridor, and the man at the centre of it all is asked to say less and less. Somewhere past the halfway mark we found we were admiring the lighting and had stopped listening, and we were cross about it, because the material is not dull.
John Myhre’s gyms and hotel rooms are dressed without fuss, and Marlene Stewart’s suits do some of the work the script leaves undone, Clay’s narrow lapels giving way to Ali’s wide ones. Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke’s score is mostly Gerrard’s voice, wordless and long held, and it works in Africa, where the film at last opens its windows and lets the crowds in. In Chicago it tells us to feel grave when we had already got the idea.
Heat (1995) and The Insider (1999) are about careful men who do their jobs and keep their counsel. Ali was neither careful nor quiet, and the film keeps trying to make him both. It is a Michael Mann film about a man who would have talked all over it.
See it for the opening, for the first Liston fight and for Voight. At home it loses little, and you can take a break at the hour mark without missing a punch. It runs 157 minutes, carries a 15 certificate and opened in British cinemas on 22 February 2002.
The reviews lean positive, though not by much, and nearly all of them agree on where the credit belongs. Will Smith’s performance is praised almost everywhere, for the charm, the intelligence and the sharpness of the impersonation, and several critics call it the chief reason to watch. The other point of agreement is the fighting: the opening sequence and the staging of the first Liston bout are singled out repeatedly as the places where Michael Mann’s control and ambition pay off.
The reservations cluster around what the film leaves out. Several critics find it narratively loose, too restrained, and short on insight into Ali’s inner life and politics, impressive to look at but shallow underneath. The spread is wide. The New Yorker calls it a unique achievement, while The Guardian offers only faint praise, and Slant finds it emotionally and politically thin. The Ringer, looking back years later, concludes the film cannot match the scale of the life it describes.
The critic calls the film a unique achievement. They praise Will Smith’s performance for capturing Ali’s sharp political temperament.
Read the full review →The review describes Mann’s film as both visceral and immensely intelligent. It singles out the virtuoso opening and the climactic recreation for praise.
Read the full review →The review finds the film slick and engrossing, though it lacks narrative coherence and leaves important aspects of Ali’s life unexplored. It praises Will Smith’s performance and especially the poetic, epic boxing sequences.
Read the full review →Freer finds the film riveting and praises Mann’s controlled, ambitious biopic, despite some dramatic sections feeling flat. He especially singles out Will Smith’s convincing performance and the vivid boxing sequences.
Read the full review →Ebert regards the film as a substantial but imperfect portrait of Ali. He singles out Will Smith’s performance as a strength.
Read the full review →The review text is unavailable, so its verdict cannot be established. No specific praise or complaint can be verified from the accessible page.
Read the full review →
When We Were KingsThe Kinshasa fight as it actually happened, with Ali talking as much as he liked.
One Night in Miami...Clay, Malcolm X and Sam Cooke in one hotel room after the Liston fight.
Raging BullThe boxing biopic every other one is measured against, and it still wins.
Malcolm XSpike Lee gives the man at Ali’s shoulder the whole film he deserves.
The InsiderMann two years earlier, with a quiet hero who suits his methods better.
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