Let's consider this: movies are STORIES.

Rating: 3/10 (27 December 2007)

This one wasn't.
We nearly turned off the DVD in the first ten minutes, a vastly overlong montage during which the Cooke tunes effectively drown out what dialogue there was, and the perspective keeps changing in a dizzying and incomprehensible melange of unrelated events.
Eventually the movie pretended to follow a linear plot, but only in jerky vignettes with damn near zero for exposition. My wife and I are both Smith fans, but while I'm a sports historian and am quite familiar with Ali's history, she wasn't. Even with my knowledge, I was painfully aware that the movie inferred without actually telling; yep, that must be Malcolm X up there ... yep, I know Clay became a Muslim and changed his name ... yep, Bundini Brown was his longtime sideman ... yep, Howard Cosell was an involved commentator ... Over and over again, I had to stop for a moment to think "Oh, right, this is THAT incident, gotcha," and filled in the background from my own memory.
My wife wasn't nearly as lucky, and any movie in which I pause ten times in the first forty-five minutes so that I can tell others what in the heck is going on isn't worth spending another hour of our lives on.
3/10, and that's pretty much of a gift for this wasted opportunity.