Last of the control-fricans

Rating: Null/10 (28 December 2001)

Actors are fond of telling the press about the care Michael Mann takes in plucking an unruly hair from their head, or arranging the tiniest flowers in an arrangement on the far edge of the frame. If they gave out Oscars for tending to the trees and ignoring the forest, Mann would have his arms full. Trying to shed his Antonioni-derived, interior decorator's style, Mann shoots in digital video, gobbles on lens flares, blows out the background, lets frame-filling faces go soft. He tries to make a mess of the life of Muhammad Ali. But what one comes away with is a strict attention to haircuts, an autistic fix on lapel widths, a lascivious ogling at ashtrays and hood ornaments and Wilson Pickett-like sound cues. And a great deal of untended-to nervousness on the part of Will Smith.
What was Mann thinking casting Smith--except that Smith was the only guy who could get a $100,000,000 movie about Muhammad Ali greenlit? When the fresh prince stands next to Jeffrey Wright (who plays...I'm not sure what), all you notice is how startlingly much Wright resembles Muhammad Ali. (No doubt Wright thought about this, too--a lot.) The picture gets some drama going in its second half, when Ali refuses to be drafted and loses his boxing license and his membership in the Nation of Islam. But what gives Ali the force of his convictions, yet lets him crumble repeatedly (as when he lets a corrupt Nation of Islam manager back into his lif after losing his life savings to him)? The movie narrates rather than inquires. And Mann devotes so much energy to getting the trimmings right, like turning Jon Voight into a nearly animatronic facsimile of Howard Cosell, that Ali's inner life goes utterly neglected.
Mann and his co-scenarist, Eric Roth, spent time working out what Ali means historically; if the movie is about anything, it's about Ali's status as an icon of black self-respect. But where's the beauty and the humor of the man? Ali was an entertainer who teased and delighted with the brashness and arrogance of his self-regard. He invited the world to join in his adoration of the wonder that was himself. Mann and Roth take a stab at depicting Ali the master of the quick comeback and the ad-libbed remark...but it's not much of a stab. And if Mann wanted to make Ali an unknowable existential hero in his usual fashion, he really picked the wrong actor. Smith comes across as an eager-to-please, well-to-do young man working very hard at playing someone he seems not to understand. He's good at playing the Ali who can work up a roomful of jaded reporters into a comic froth, but when Ali is meant to be soulsick Smith registers nothing. He's weightless.
ALI represents some kind of herculean effort on Mann's (and a lot of other people's) part, but it feels oddly unambitious. Wasn't Mann the least bit afraid of walking in the shadow of the RAGING BULL boxing scenes? Visually, the movie is much less distinctive than Mann's relatively straightforward THE INSIDER. Mann has one undeniable gift: turning what could be prosaic, journalistic moments into sleepy, in-and-out dreamscapes--accomplished mostly through the use of trancelike New Age music. But that opium vapor that seemed so apropos to the world of MIAMI VICE--what the hell does it have to do with Muhammad Ali? The canvas of ALI is too big for this assiduous minimalist. The movie makes you appreciate the biographical points of view, however nutty or incomplete, of Spike Lee and Oliver Stone.