disappointing

Rating: 5/10 (13 February 2002)

I'm a big Michael Mann fan, had anyone else directed this not even sure I would have gone to see it. But, I don't think he succeeded with this one. Maybe Ali is just to familiar to me, but I kept seeing Will Smith playing Ali, not Ali himself. I also thought he looked a bit small, did not have the more physically imposing presence that Ali had.
Regarding the story, the final fight with Foreman was dealt with in a much better manner in the documentary "When We Were Kings", so I found that segment already familiar and disappointing. The movie never really gave me a sense of why he became such a popular figure, his rise to world wide fame is something the movie did not attempt to deal with. Also an odd flow to the movie, little narrative, I didn't even know what city Ali lived in until he was introduced as the Louisville slugger, the end of his first marriage dealt with in a minute or so, and his appeal to his jail sentence dealt with only peripherally, no sense of how long that went on or how he ultimately won an 8-0 victory in the Supreme Court (as an aside, there are 9 justices, wonder what happened to number 9).