Michael Mann’s ALI failed on a great many levels to impress me, to hold my attention or to involve me with any sense of consistency at all.
I’ll start with the chief problem I have with the movie. I don’t need to see Ali at the press conferences and in the ring. I’ve seen all that before. I found myself waiting for the fights to end, for the hype for the fights to end, because the only aspect of this film that engaged me were the tiny scenes, let me try and explain why.
You see, I was alive, young and incredibly impressionable when Ali was on TV and doing interviews and on Talk Shows in the Seventies. When I got older, I watched fight tapes and read histories all about Ali. I love to death WHEN WE WERE KINGS, in fact after watching this movie, I went home and watched it twice to wash the blandness out.
You can tell that Michael Mann studied Ali’s life in pictures and the amazing WHEN WE WERE KINGS Whole scenes are lifted straight out of it. He worked to capture this, so that it would hopefully resonate with the viewer as cementing and replacing Will Smith's Ali in your concious brain. Unfortunately the scenes aped from the reality of Ali’s life were the absolute worst scenes of the flick.
Why?
Quite frankly, because scenes that I’ve seen Ali live in reality left the stronger more honest feeling. You see Will Smith is trying hard to look like someone trying to act like he’s the greatest. Ali, well… Ali was the greatest. There was no doubt in Ali’s face, no hesitation, no fore-knowledge. His mouth just started, his will was indomitable. He was a fireball of passion and confidence. Ali could do a full 30 minute press conference that would just hold you in rapt attention. With Smith’s performance, it is done in cuts, takes and I can’t help but see the pieces pushed together with all the cracks exposed.
When playing Ali, if you are going to try and step into his life and play the most famous of Ali moments, then you have to do it without cutting away. The way Mann shoots Will’s performance would be like making a film about the life of Fred Astaire and shooting his dancing through a series or rapid edits and close-ups of feet and legs married with medium upper torso shots. You strip away the genius of the man by cutting away, segmenting the reality, and it is a subtle thing that simply adds up in the viewer's mind to say, "Will Smith is no Muhammad Ali."
NOW, having said that. The second we step outside those moments of ‘reality regurgitation’. As soon as the film decides to peek behind the veil of Ali’s camera life, we get the best of the film.
Watching Ali in his Harlem Hotel after his Sonny Liston 1 fight watching TV, when Malcolm X comes over. Ali’s watching a program about termites. The scene is great.
However, scenes like these are rare. We see Ali’s love of women, but we never truly get to see the charm he used on the world focused like a laser upon the woman he was trying to seduce at the time. Harnessing all that charisma, all that charm and that silver tongue of his to capture the eyes and love of the woman he desires. Because Ali didn’t write this dialogue for them, they don’t capture what we can imagine he would be like. No cameras or tape recorders captured these secret conversations, and the writers did not have the imagination to charm us as I can only imagine the real Ali could. A couple of times you get a glimmer of that charm in these scenes. However, it just isn’t consistent.
Now Will Smith’s vaunted Ali performance. At Smith's best we find amazing moments of passion when Ali is speaking out against the United States' desire to force him to kill poor Vietnamese that had never done him harm. Well, I’m afraid to a large degree we never are allowed to see a great Will Smith performance, because the peak emotional scenes are rendered completely useless by Michael Mann’s insistence to intercut musical numbers or even worse… He kills all audio from the scene, and amps up some music. The result is a vain attempt to force our emotions or to make us under-write scenes with our own sense of poignancy to the moment.
The absolute worst case of this is the Death of Malcolm X. Instead of us seeing and hearing the agony of the champ, it is drowned in music. What is terrible here is it robs us of Will’s performance. The sounds he made, all gone. We are never really allowed to get intimately real with Ali.
In addition, if the film ever comes close to showing Ali as a possible womanizer or highlighting his weakness for women or the hurt caused in those women by a shifting of Ali’s focus and charms… We get out of there. Oh no, can’t focus on this intimate moment, we have to run to a press conference… something safe, something that doesn’t diminish the vision of Ali.
As for Jon Voight’s highly acclaimed turn as Howard Cosell, well… I wasn’t impressed. Basically he’s doing Cosell’s easily doable distinctive voice. But otherwise, it is all make-up. Extremely good make-up, but about 80% of that performance is the make-up. Voight doesn’t transform, he was transformed by somebody else, and delivered what was an emotionally vapid turn of celebrity impersonation. Voight might very well be attempting to become the modern day Paul Muni, but it takes more than just a voice and some make up. It takes a role. As Cosell is written, he’s just the public Cosell with just the smallest of behind the scenes looks. No real spark though, it isn’t a great performance by any stretch of the imagination. HOWEVER, it is GREAT MAKE-UP!!!
The film is shot with a lot of desaturation of colors. Like everything is slightly faded. We don’t get the rich tones of a film like WHEN WE WERE KINGS. You don’t get that sense of vibrancy. Instead it is this bleaching process. Personally, it didn’t do it for me.
Is the film awful? No. It is just painfully mediocre or for a nicer word… it is average. Great Biography films dare to force the viewer to reimagine your thoughts regarding the person in question.
Films like GODS AND MONSTERS or AMADEUS. It is a darn shame that this film is as pedestrian as it was for me. Like I said, Ali was an anchor in my life as a young boy. I remember the day he lost his final fight, it was as if a family member died. For me, Ali was indestructible. A superman. Hell he whupped Superman. And to this boy, Ali was a God.
I met Ali and had the chance to share a few words with him. When I went to the World Premiere of GODZILLA, Ali and his wife attended as well. On the flight from New York to Atlanta (I believe it was) I sat across the aisle from THE GREATEST. I was flying with Glen Oliver of FilmForce and we were both in awe. This was Muhammad Ali. One of the Greatest personalities of all time. A man that stood up to the Vietnam War and the U.S. Government. A man that reinvented himself and became forever a symbol of greatness. When I shook his hand, I cried, because I’d seen him on TV, on Film and fighting Superman. I had action figures and coloring books of this man.
There are few times in a man’s life where you are in direct contact with someone that makes you feel insignificant yet makes you feel great. Meeting the real Ali was like that for me. BTW, he didn’t care for GODZILLA too much. He thought Godzilla could have been meaner.
See, Ali even has better taste in movies than me. He is the Greatest. It took me a second viewing to see that.
