Sitting through all two-and-a-half hours of director Michael Mann's Ali is a lot like being locked in a small room with a feisty 8-year-old with Attention Deficit Disorder. Between the jittery style-gymnastics of Mann's film and a storyline that flits willy-nilly from one event to another, Ali may not be the year's most blatant example of Hollywood at its most ADD-ified (that would probably have to be Town and Country or Freddy Got Fingered) but it's certainly the most unfortunate. It would be a lot easier to forgive Ali its missteps and discombobulations if its subject matter weren't so richly deserving of something better. Muhammad Ali is a figure who towers over our era in a way that's almost impossible to underestimate. A genius of a fighter and a man of great charm, attitude, pride and conviction, Ali lived a controversial life, which has intersected with and sometimes precipitated many of the key events and cultural phenomena of the 20th century. He was and continues to be a hero to millions of people around the world and, for what it's worth, he's about as close to a poet-warrior as any of us are likely to see in our lifetimes.
Small wonder then that Ali is such a mess. There are just so many things you could say about this guy, and Mann and his co-screenwriters seem to attempt to say it all, with little effort made to weed out what's important from what's not. In the process, the movie winds up saying virtually nothing.
Ali gives us a scattershot picture, at best, of this iconic figure, focusing almost exclusively on the decade-long period of his highest visibility, from the mid-'60s into the '70s. Mann sets the stage during the opening credits, pummeling us with a montage of images that serves as a blitzkrieg history lesson in the sorry state of American race relations during the middle of the last century.
To the tune of Sam Cooke's impassioned reading of A Change is Gonna Come, we're bombarded with key images signifying events that surely shaped the young Cassius Clay — a segregated bus, a newspaper headline screaming about lynchings, a black man methodically painting a portrait of a blond, blue-eyed Jesus. The artist turns out to be young Cassius' father, and the boy watching him, the one with the skeptical eyebrow raised, is none other than the future Ali.
Flash forward to 1964 and the fight that would catapult the young boxer into the public eye. This is the famous championship fight with Sonny Liston, and Mann shoots the event in a frantic, in-your-face manner that carries a certain undeniable amount of excitement but, for lack of a better word, very little poetry — a real mistake considering Ali was the most poetic of fighters.
It's a safe bet that Mann was trying to avoid direct comparison with Raging Bull, the definitive modern boxing movie, and the consummate lyricism of its fight sequences. Still, the Clay-Liston fight, and every other fight depicted in Ali, conveys little of the grace, power, style and skill that made Ali such a formidable pugilist. At the end of the Liston fight, the 22-year-old, 7-to-1 underdog Clay emerged as the Heavyweight Champion of the World, but from watching the event take place in Ali, we're not quite sure how or why it happened.
The agitated, borderline chaotic quality of the fight sequences carries over to the movie's overall visual style and, even more regrettably, to the way it tells its story. Ali is erratic and often incoherently structured, with little real dramatic momentum and a script that seems composed, with one or two notable exceptions, of random moments in the main character's life. Important events are frequently alluded to but not made particularly clear, almost as if key connective tissue from this already too-long film had been relegated to the cutting room floor simply in the interests of making the movie shorter.
A major subplot revolves around a rift between Ali's friend Malcolm X (Jeffrey Wright) and Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad, but we never actually discover the source of their feud. Likewise, we see Ali floating from wife to wife with no real sense of how he got there or who these women are (that's a problem not just with the wives and ex-wives, but with pretty much every character in the film). In one scene, Ali is bitching about his wife's choice of clothing, and in the very next scene she's gone, apparently another divorce-notch on the champ's belt.
Individual sequences seem disconnected from one another and take on all the surreal weightlessness of virtual soundbites. We get a brief glimpse of a casual get-together with Jim Brown, Sam Cooke and Malcolm X hanging with Ali in his apartment and watching old horror movies with the champ's kids. It's a great, iconic moment, but it just lies there, not able or willing to do anything but just show us those famous faces. The movie also forces us to quickly relive not just the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., but Malcolm X's murder too. Ali's tears over the later event are supposedly poignant because of a strain that developed toward the end of the Ali-Malcolm relationship, but that strain barely registers in the movie's muddled, surface-skimming narrative. Ali simply moves forward in time, mixing famous events with sketchy, oddly chosen private moments apparently intended to reveal what this legendary figure was "really like."
One of the few things Ali gets absolutely right is its positioning of the boxer's refusal to go to Vietnam as the crux and core of the movie. Ali's outspoken beliefs on the Vietnam war (immortalized in his famous observation "Ain't no Vietcong ever called me nigger") and his refusal to be inducted into military service probably constituted both his single greatest defining moment and the exact instant of the beginning of his end. Ali recognizes this and spends considerable time focusing on this period, when much of America (or at least white America) turned against him. Ali lost his championship title as well as his boxing license and his very livelihood, and the movie is at its best when pumping the epic dimensions of this tragedy for all they're worth.
The Vietnam debacle and Ali's subsequent downfall lead naturally into his eventual redemption years later, when he wins back his title in high style in an upset match with George Foreman in Zaire, Africa. That's where Ali's final act is staged (after a long, rambling section detailing Ali's desperate efforts to regain his title) — although even here, with a strong, clear, snatching-victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat story to tell, the movie just can't manage to convey the power and drama of what actually happened. (For a substantially more effective account of the Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle," proceed directly to your nearest video-DVD rental store and check out the extraordinary documentary When We Were Kings).
Ali meanders and floats when it should sting like a bee, failing to fully communicate the desperation and hopelessness of Ali's situation going into the career-capping Zaire fight. Even more disappointing, the movie doesn't really give us a sense of what a monumental hero this man was, even in what might be considered the twilight of his career, to ordinary folks in Africa and the rest of the world. Instead, Ali chooses to divert its narrative flow once again and focus our attentions on one more pointless romantic dalliance and marital crisis — to no discernible effect.
For what it's worth, Will Smith is passable as Ali, and re-creates some of the champ's most well-known public pronouncements with all the skill of a master mimic. When push comes to shove, however, and particularly in the movie's more intimate moments, Smith fails to bring the considerable grandeur, gravity and, frankly, raw charisma that this role demands.
Most of the other performances are barely worth mentioning, since virtually every other character in the film only gets to utter a handful of lines. Oddly enough, the movie's only other role worth singling out is that of an old white guy — Howard Cosell. Although it comes dangerously close to the Jim Carrey/Andy Kaufmann syndrome of acting-as-impersonation, Jon Voight is brilliant (and virtually unrecognizable) as Cosell, from his irritating accent, to his painted-on eyebrows to the worst toupee known to man. It's a nifty little bit of business but not nearly nifty enough to anchor this unshapely slab of driftwood disguised as a blockbuster disguised as history.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Dec 27, 2001 – Jan 2, 2002.