A fine work, more well-proportioned than it's given credit for being

Rating: 8/10 (1 August 2002)

The short cut to being counted as a genuine auteur is to use one utterly bizarre, unjustifiable device in each film. Here, it's the interpolation of digital footage. Every so often, in the middle of what is otherwise a real film, we'll get some muddy shots that were taken with a digital camera, sometimes shots of the very same kind of thing we'd just seen in 35mm. It doesn't happen very often (thank goodness). Why does it happen at all?
Let's pretend it doesn't. All in all what's striking is how WELL the movie has been shot - yea, even with the shaky camerawork, which ruined "The Insider" but somehow makes us feel as though we're watching history itself here; besides which, it looks damned good, which is the main thing.
I loathe boxing. I would be delighted to see it vanish off the face of the Earth. I have to strain to make myself believe that people actually paid to see the fights we see here - quite apart from anything else, how long do they last, half an hour? less? -And yet, I found myself seeing something of what other people see in the sport, as I watched the opening fight sequence and saw, actually SAW, that there IS more to it than two men punching each other until one of them falls over. (Television footage of actual boxing had never had any such effect on me.)
The film sticks to a ten-year segment of Mohammed Ali's life and doesn't step outside it. "We see virtually nothing about how he was raised," says one writer here, "what his parents were like, what kind of values they instilled in him, what motivated him to become a boxer and, most importantly, what drew him so passionately to the creed espoused by the Nation of Islam." I chose this quote at random; hundreds of other people have said much the same thing, but unlike them, and unlike the person I've quoted, I see this as the film's primary strength, not a weakness at all. Attempts to tell "the story" of so-and-so's life rarely come to anything much. The sin is always to try to include too much (and likely as not, fail). Here, we see events which we sense have a cause (they don't feel manufactured), even though we never see what the cause is, and if we don't always know what Ali is thinking or exactly what he is feeling, well, what of it? We're given enough to go on to make educated guesses. As with the superb "Topsy-Turvy", we're given a SEGMENT of history, which feels as though it's still connected to the pieces of history on either side of it, which nonetheless, when held up to the light like this, turns out to have a satisfying shape of its own.