Director KO's Movie

Rating: Null/10 (12 April 2004)

If all I ever knew of Muhammad Ali came from this movie, I would think him a boring, womanizing, unremarkable Palooka. Michael Mann manages the extremely difficult feat of making the dynamic and charismatic Ali an uninteresting void. This movie pretends to look inside Ali, and it finds nothing there! And apparently there was no life before Liston or after Foreman.
The first third of the movie is really about Malcolm X. The director makes him boring, too. That I can live with, because X sort of came off that way. But his interaction with Ali could have been interesting, but is not in this flick.
Ali's courageous decision to refuse military service during the Viet Nam war is depicted here more as an act of racial petulance then of conviction.

As to the players, well Smith is good. With another director he might have won that Oscar. Jamie Fox as Bundini Brown is an unsympathetic cardboard character. Ron Silver suffers through playing Angelo Dundee as reduced to almost a non-speaking role (Wasn't Dundee even a factor in Ali's life?). The women are forgettable if not somewhat annoying.
Jon Voight IS Howard Cosell, and here the movie looks a bit deeper into their strange relationship. The brief scenes with Cosell and a very short car ride with Joe Frazier are the high points of this overlong and dull movie which takes a legend and levels him to a not too interesting and not too bright human with all the personality of a can of paint.