"Ali"

Will Smith flies like a butterfly, but what director Michael Mann does to the greatest fighter of all time just stings.

By Charles Taylor

Dec 25, 2001 | Michael Mann is one of those filmmakers who makes sure that he's the star of his movies. Mann works in a huge, even overblown style, with the portentous winds of myth blowing. The style worked in his last movie "The Insider." The huge screen spaces that threatened to swallow up Russell Crowe and Al Pacino felt like the machinations of the corporate, media and political world their characters found themselves caught in.

It doesn't work in "Ali," which constantly struggles to attain the level of myth. Didn't Mann realize that Muhammad Ali already is a myth? Had he just told Ali's story, and not let his own excess get in the way, the movie might have succeeded. As it is, his style constantly gets in the way, pumping up events that are so embedded in our consciousness they don't need to be made any bigger.

The screenplay, by Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, and Mann and Eric Roth, spans 10 years, from when Ali won the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston in 1964 to when he reclaimed it from George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974 -- the famous "Rumble in the Jungle." That's a good arc, bookended as it is by two triumphs, and encompassing the four years when he was banned from boxing for refusing induction into the Army, a decision later unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court when it ruled that Ali's right to practice his religion had been violated.

At first it looks like Mann's style might be just the way to go. The montage that opens the movie contrasts the public showboating of Ali (then Cassius Clay, played by Will Smith), boasting that he would defeat Sonny Liston, with the intensity of his training when there was no audience around. And all of this is intercut with a deliciously sexy scene of Ali's idol, Sam Cooke (David Elliott, doing a pretty damn good impersonation), performing in a Miami club.

The fight sequences that begin and end the film are both smartly conceived and executed. In the first, we watch from Ali's point of view as Liston (Michael Bentt, one of a series of real boxers who play Ali's most famous opponents) lumbers menacingly towards him and throws a punch that whooshes by the camera. That's, of course, what happened in the legendary fight: The 23-year-old Clay stymied Liston with his speed. As the film's Ali grows more confident, Smith captures his arrogance, circling the ring as he contemptuously takes in the damage he's done to Liston, his agility conveying to the huffing and puffing (and furious) champ that the power of his punch counts for nothing.

That's the same message Ali sends to George Foreman in the climactic fight scene in Zaire, the bout in which Ali took back the title from Foreman (who had taken it from Joe Frazier). In "On Boxing," Joyce Carol Oates wrote that when Ali returned from his forced hiatus the speed of his youth was gone, but he had learned a terrible lesson: He could take a punch. Foreman was such a powerful fighter, and Ali had suffered so badly at the hands of Joe Frazier, that even his own camp was sure he was going to be terribly hurt in the fight.

Even if you know what's coming at this point in "Ali" (a victory described blow-by-blow a few years back in the documentary "When We Were Kings"), it happens so fast that you're not prepared for it. The cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shoots the fight scenes close in, so we feel each opponent's breath, but there are times when you want more of a wide view to allow you to see their footwork. And the washed-out grain used to reflect what Mann thinks is a semi-documentary style has none of the rich sensuousness of Lubezki's work for "Great Expectations" director Alfonso Cuaron. At the same time, the style does work to put you in the midst of the action, and to make what's going on outside the ring fall away.

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