Sorry, no can do.

Rating: Null/10 (9 January 2002)

Ali tried hard, and you can really tell that Michael Mann poured his heart into the making of this epic film. The directing is fantastic. Likewise, Will Smith, who said he "didn't want to be known as the guy who messed up the Ali film", doesn't. Jamie Fox and Jon Voight are also fantastic.
But Ali - the film - doesn't match up. As someone below said: It's "self-consciously artistic." Very accurate. Mann tries too hard to make this an artistic film about a man and world events that weren't very artistic.
Civil rights and racism are not matters that can be told with slow motion, native songs and obscure flashbacks. Likewise, they should not be told through the eyes of someone who cavorted with extremists and racists. The fight for civil rights in the 1960's was too important to be cheapened by the radical views of those who replace their names with X-es to make a pointless statement.
Likewise, the attempt to show Ali's life as one governed by care for the black man was muddled by his contempt for the black woman - perhaps an accurate reflection of Ali's life and personality, but this film was obviously not trying to be biographical.
And this is the worst part. At times it's about Ali's boxing, spending close to an hour's time on the three defining fights of Clay/Ali's career. At times it's about Ali's personal life, focusing on two of his wives and a girlfriend. So the film purports to be a biography.
But then it veers off into thinly veiled social commentary, focusing not on Ali, but rather on Malcolm X and the radical Muslims he and Ali belonged to. No mention of Ali's younger days except for a brief flashback. And nothing after his third major fight. A biographical film that spends almost three hours focusing on a 15-year period of a man's life, and usually spends more time focusing on the issues surrounding his life than on his life itself.
All this turns Mann's deft artistry into shambles, creating nothing more than a muddled version of a life at its peak, leaving a civil rights and sports legend looking like an extremist, a racist and a womanizer.
4/10