Will Smith plays Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali across ten years in Ali, Michael Mann’s sprawling biopic of the boxer’s rise and fall and rise again. The film covers the Liston win, the name change, the Vietnam refusal, the Frazier loss, and the Rumble in the Jungle, and it wants to do justice to all of it. Mostly it succeeds, but the weight of that ambition shows in places.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Smith and the Cast Carry It
Smith carries the picture. He moves with the physical grace that made him famous, and he finds the cocksure humor in Clay’s early years while still landing the quieter, angrier turns later on. Jamie Foxx as Bundini Brown and Jon Voight as Howard Cosell get smaller roles but leave bigger impressions. The supporting cast fills out the world around Ali without stealing focus from the man at its center.
The Malcolm X Plotline Carries the Weight
The film leans hard on the Malcolm X plotline to stand in for the larger political upheaval of the era. That works well enough to show the stakes of Ali’s refusal of the draft, but it flattens the broader social conflict into a single friendship. The assassination of Malcolm X gets treated as a turning point for Ali, which it was, but the film doesn’t spend enough time on what that loss meant for the movement itself.
“Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”
The Liston Win and the Rumble in the Jungle
The film is at its best when it slows down. The Liston win, with its infamous taunting and the round-five glove incident, gets the space it deserves. So does the Rumble in the Jungle, where the film captures the heat and the spectacle of the fight. Those scenes feel alive in a way the middle stretch of the film never quite reaches.
What Gets Rushed
The film’s weakness comes from trying to fit too much history into one sitting. Mann compresses decades into a single narrative thread, which means some fights — Liston’s second defeat, the Quarry fight, the Frazier rematch — get rushed past in a few minutes. That pace works for the big set pieces, like the Liston win and the Rumble in the Jungle, but it leaves the smaller fights feeling like connective tissue rather than fights themselves.
The Reception Split
The film’s reception split audiences and critics alike. Reviews were generally positive, but it underperformed at the box office, earning $87.7 million against a $105 million budget. That gap between praise and return is telling — the film asked for patience and attention, and not enough people were willing to give it either.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1964 | Liston win |
| 1964–1965 | Name change, marriage to Sonji Roi |
| 1966 | Vietnam refusal |
| 1971 | Frazier loss |
| 1974 | Rumble in the Jungle |
Verdict: Ali is a worthy entry in the biopic genre, anchored by a strong performance from Smith and a few genuinely electric sequences. It stumbles through its middle sections, rushing through fights and flattening history, but the highs are high enough to recommend it.
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