Mannhunting - Ali

June 13, 2023·1 hr 21 min·6 clips

Why does Michael Mann's biopic of Muhammad Ali feel like a collage of other movies instead of a cohesive story?

Regular panelist Dia Lucina is absent. The host marks that before settling in with Alex Navarro, so the Ali conversation starts with a slightly quieter, more careful tone. Then they place the movie in Mann's filmography. His 2001 biopic has Will Smith playing Muhammad Ali amid race, class, politics, and the forces moving through the 60s and 70s. The host remembers seeing it only once, partly because it felt like such an odd turn away from Mann's crime and procedural work. The revisit complicates that. By the end, Ali feels less like a full detour and more like Mann returning to familiar concerns in a messier key. The problem is focus. The panel keeps finding ideas the movie raises without pushing them into each other: pan-African politics, corrupt power, opportunistic management, Ali's own thinking, and the cost of turning all of that into a clean movie shape. Belinda becomes the clearest way into that frustration. Her objections to Herbert, to the Nation's absence during Ali's boxing exile, and to the Zaire promotion show the sharper version of the movie that might have been. Herbert slips back in too easily. The panel notices how Barry Henley's manager figure can vanish when Ali loses his license, then return with only a little humility required. Zaire brings the same issue back around. Belinda names the dictatorship around the fight and Don King's promotional machinery, while Ali's answer comes down to needing hard people to get things done. The movie sees the contradiction. What bugs the speakers is that noticing a contradiction is not the same as dramatizing it. They want more pressure, consequence, and shape. That is a very Waypoint complaint: they are not brushing off the ambition, they are asking the film to carry its history with more coherence. Collateral becomes the exit ramp. The closing beat looks toward next month's rewatch, where the host expects Mann's tighter focus to throw Ali's looseness into relief. The leftovers are still worth it. Even a middling Mann entry gives them a reason to circle back to When We Were Kings and Malcolm X, which nobody seems to regret.

As heard by us

A funny, pointed Mannhunting entry on Ali, where boxing legend meets political compromise and an unusually muddled Mann film.

Mannhunting takes on Ali as one of Michael Mann's stranger detours: a historical biopic that wants to fold Muhammad Ali's public life into the racial, class, and political pressures of the 60s and 70s.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play if you want Michael Mann's Ali and a debate about whether its ideas fully hold together.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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