Good Actors + Good Director = Really Bad Movie

Rating: 3/10 (3 January 2002)

First things first, there was no way this movie could've been good. How could you make a movie about the life of arguably the greatest and most influential athlete of the 20th century, choosing to do only a certain 10-year period of it, and squeeze it comfortably in two hours? Well, you can't. (And it was closer to three hours.) What this movie doesn't do is tell its audience what made Muhammad Ali great, or what made him influential. It doesn't dig into his mind to try and explain his charisma or cockiness. (If you want to know anything about Muhammad Ali, go watch one of those A&E documentaries.) What we are left with is a few of his fights with some so-called plot sandwiched in between.
But enough with the bashing. Let's give some credit where credit is due.
Acting.
This was to be the movie that made Will Smith great. He was supposed to win the 2002 Academy Award for Best Actor in a landslide. And believe me, Will Smith did not disappoint. Along with he 30-35 lbs of muscle he added on to look the part, he definitely talked the part as well, though the dullness of the movie will probably cost him his Oscar. Jamie Foxx as Ali's sidekick and corner-man Drew `Bundini' Brown brought some much needed comic relief to the movie. Foxx's oversized belly and thinning hair made his role that much more believable. But arguably the best acting performance was done by Jon Voight portraying sports analyst Howard Cossell. His makeup and voice brought audiences back to the days of ABC's Wide World of Sports with stunning accuracy.
Direction and photography.
Not often could a bad movie be the result of a director who did his job fairly well. The movie lagged extremely. But the fight scenes were probably one of the best caught on film. What satisfied me the most was its realism. (I guess this would be a spoiler if you've never seen an Ali fight.) The lasting images of Ali standing over Sonny Liston in Ali-Liston II, Frazier knocking down Ali in there first bout, and George Foreman twirling around the ring before collapsing flat on his back, out of breath were just the way I remembered them. Too bad the fight scenes were the only things in the movie worth watching.
If I were to cite the things in this movie that could've been improved, we may be here for a while. So I'll just say that the Will Smith, Jon Voight, Jamie Foxx, and Michael Mann couldn't save this movie from failing before it even started. But they did do their best.
My score for this movie - 3/10.