Michael Mann at the Crossroads

Rating: 10/10 (29 April 2002)

Ali marks a break in Michael Mann's career. Only time will tell whether it is a point of return.
An established master visualist with an unparalleled eye for detail, Mann had so far operated within pretty strict genre boundaries, allowing him to silently revolutionize them each in turn. Heat is up there in the pantheon of cops vs robbers epics, Last of the Mohicans is THE romantic period adventure film, and nobody can argue that the Miami Vice show is the most 80s thing ever created. A visual stylist then, and one who has been good at surrounding himself with the finest talent in the industry on both sides of the camera.
What would happen, then, if the Michael Mann train, that well-oiled, slick juggernaught, were to run off the rains into the wilderness? Ali provides an interesting glimpse. It is a biographical film in that it builds on real people and events, but its structure is far removed from the standard formula. it is a character study, sometimes breaking the surface, but more often than not, staring in fascination, which is bound to delight as well as frustrate. Refreshingly though, it is a choice the film commits to 100 percent.
Like all Michael Mann films, it is a present-tense film, existing in the here and now, devoid of expository flashbacks: when we meet Will Smith's Cassius Clay, he is already Mohammed Ali, though he may not fully realize it yet. It is the political significance of Clay becoming Ali that the film is more concerned with, much more-so than the actual boxing, which, expertly as it is shown, takes up relatively little of the film's running time.
We follow the "Greatest" from his discovery of Islam to his final great political stand in Zaire, all the while focusing on the little details and impressions rather than narrative beats. Throughout, well-surrounded though he is, Smith carries the full weight of the film on his shoulders, and he never lets us down once, giving his character an unparalleled aura of power and peace unparalleled. It is bewildering to thing that the Academy instead chose to crown Denzel Washington for his cartoon villain in Training Day.
The care and love poured into this oozes out of every immaculate frame, and, not for the first time, Michael Mann shows us the difference between a "movie" and a "film". Worth your time and consideration? You bet!