So, this evening I perused HBONOW alphabetically and quickly found my eyes resting on a film, 2001’s Ali, that seems to be timely given its historical protagonist’s demise recently. So I popped it on and just finished its lengthy two hour and thirty-seven minute runtime. I was a little underwhelmed, as I remember from my first viewing.
As for acting, the real standout here, I feel Will Smith did a pretty great job. The hardest thing for a high-profile movie star like him to do, especially when playing such iconic figures, is to make us momentarily forget that we’re not looking at the original. I had moments when Smith assumed the legendary charisma of Ali and his manic energy so well that I genuinely lost the sense of watching a film and felt like I was watching a man just putting on a great show.
Another person who deserves a note is Jon Voight as Howard Cosell. Both in his dry onscreen persona and in his more tender and personal moments with Ali, Voight managed to maintain that balance of humanity and affability that I have seen in footage of Cosell. Credit should also be given to the makeup department in hiding the recognizable face of Voight, allowing him to inhabit the role more completely. In that spirit, it also seems worth mentioning part of Smith’s accomplishment in taking on this role and inhabiting the spirit of Ali, without really looking that much like him.
A quick shout out to Jamie Foxx as Bundini, Mario van Peebles as Malcolm, and the actors playing Ali’s three main opponents: Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman, seems incumbent on me. Foxx plays the hype man and friend of Ali with a frantic quality that matches the portrayed personality and troubles. Mario van Peebles has the thankless duty of following Denzel in one of his most powerful and pivotal roles. He shows in a limited situation the humanity and tenderness of Malcolm, especially in relation to Ali.
The three roles of the opponents are played well in each case, showcasing the brute strength of these men. James Toney as Joe Frazier has a great moment, switching naturally, in an unnatural moment, between the hardness of his battling personality to the softness of a man having compassion on another and offering Ali money to get him to their fight.
Now, in spite of a number of good performances, even one remarkable one, this film fails to wow me. I lay this to what I assume is a writing issue. The film is well longer than it should have been for one that portrays a shortened version of Ali’s career.
It often portrays situations somewhat impressionistically, which can be done well, as in Stoppard’s Anna Karenina, but this film often seems to lazily try to build the emotional background to a scene through repeated cuts to musical performers. This motif seemed tired before they’d even finished it the first time and they repeated it several times. Numerous scenes of dialogue, especially between Ali and his lovers, seem directionless, the opposite of stilted, over-written dialogue, the characters meander, vaguely addressing the issues between them and then the scene moves on.
The most annoying instance is in the strange post-facto revelation of Ali’s infidelity. There seems almost no indication during Ali’s relationship with his second wife that he has a wandering eye, but when she leaves Africa to attend to their sick daughter, which is preceded by one of the strangest, most poorly written arguments I remember from a movie, he’s suddenly got an eye for everything that moves, or so the first person camera would have us believe.
After his wife returns, they have an argument revealing that he’s been unfaithful before and I was a little shocked, because no mention of it came at any point earlier in the film. We are now over two hours in and during the first hour, Ali yells at his father, insisting he’ll never run around on his wife. This reversal of his ideals of fidelity would have had more effect if it had been gradually revealed, but now it looks lazy and doesn’t have the intended effect.
A couple of other items should be given positive mention after that little tirade. The physical aspect of the numerous, lengthily portrayed fights are extremely well done. I think this film portrays boxing nearly as well as has been done in a film, which is accomplished by telling a clear narrative of the fight and all the lead-up. Yet, A couple of mistakes seem to be made.
As a sports film, I can see the allure of portraying Ali’s prowess and success as coming from on-the-spot genius, but in a little research into things, I can now see that the “rope-a-dope” style was developed from the later rounds of his fight with Frazier and didn’t occur to him at the second round of the “Rumble in the Jungle.” The desire to show Ali as a genius, misunderstood by all around him, which the film goes out of its way to do, makes them show him out of step with his partners in the corner, which is probably false.
A similar thing happens in Ali’s induction ceremony. It seems to portray Ali as temperamentally deciding to refuse induction, possibly because the representative of the government calls him Clay, instead of acting on his genuine conscientious belief, which makes him seem petty, instead of brave, which seems pretty unfair, considering how serious he seems to have taken the whole thing. It also shows him giving his famous quote, “No Viet Cong never called me nigger,” over the telephone in a fit, to the surprise of his friends, making his whole campaign feel very emotion-driven.
Overall, I felt this film failed in a lot of ways to do much more than give good moments to Smith and spur an interest in understanding Ali better. It didn’t accomplish its task in terms of cohesion, thoroughness, or consistency. Moments shine through, rather brightly, but the film as a whole in unspectacular. Its true goal may well have been as a vehicle to propel Will Smith to bigger things. In that way, it was very successful.
