Come back Rocky, all is forgiven!

Rating: 6/10 (26 October 2005)

Muhammed Ali was the best boxer of his generation, a scurrilous and incisive wit, and a black activist and role model. Stripped of his title after refusing to fight in Vietnam, and subsequently beaten on his return to the ring, he went on to reclaim his world titles, before retiring and (very probably as a direct result of his long career) developing a form of Parkinson's disease. With such a rich biography, a film of Ali's life should by rights be among "the greatest" of movies, but sadly, 'Ali' has been made by Michael Mann, a director whose work is both middlebrow and pretentious: it always seems to be making a point about saying something, without actually saying very much at all. For this film, Mann has chosen to construct a collage of scenes from Ali's life, set to music, rather than to build a conventional narrative. It's an odd approach: to those utterly unfamiliar with the events of Ali's life, I suspect the film would seem baffling: yet there's little in the way of deep insight into Ali's character to compensate. Indeed, while Will Smith, an actor who usually features in comic movie, shows (and not for the first time) that he can play straight, in his hands Ali is (whisper is softly) almost a little dull: the playful menace of the original is mimicked but not matched.
And some of Mann's decisions I just don't understand. The film begins, for example, with a handful of dialogue-free scenes prior to showing us Ali's first big fight. The fight thus begins before the film has had a chance to induce any sort of emotional attachment to the character. And the stylised representation of the fighting itself comprises the most boring representation of boxing on screen that I have ever seen. Personally, I'm no great fan of the sport, but there's a visceral quality in evidence when you watch any real fight on television that just isn't conveyed here. In part, this is because Mann seems determined to eschew narrative potential at all times, as if to ensure his film is never a sporting melodrama, even when he is reconstructing exactly such an event in real life. For example: in Sylvester Stallone's film 'Rocky', hardly a classic of cinema, a key element of the fight scenes is the depiction of the ring girls, who parade with the number of each round before it begins. They naturally add to the narrative tension for the audience, pacing us through the fight. In the final fight shown in 'Ali' (the famous Ali-Foreman encounter in Zaire), we also see the ring girls: but they hold their numbers off camera, so we have no idea how long the fight has to go. If unintentional, his would be so incompetent I can only assume it is deliberate; but rather baffling, nonetheless. By contrast, the purpose of using uplifting, "spiritual" African music to accompany the Zairean scenes is, on the other hand, crassly obvious. The film thus seems to aspire to force us to assign a certain higher meaning to the events it depicts; yet has no interest in milking the basic story for its innate drama. Instead of showing us how things were, and leaving us to ponder why Ali became an icon, the film serves us a legendary, but vaguely defined, hero. The failure to even mention Ali's later suffering (in spite of a "what happened next" caption at the end of the film) seems cowardly and wrong.
For all that, Ali's story remains mesmerising. But this film made me want to watch a proper documentary instead.