Netflix is now streaming one of the best sports movies ever made. Find out what it is and why you should watch it.
The first time we really see Will Smith as Muhammad Ali in the 2001 biopic bearing the boxer’s name, it’s at a press conference. Ali, then still going by his given name of Cassius Clay, has arrived to weigh in — in multiple respects — before his title match against the heavyweight champion, Sonny Liston (Michael Bentt). Smith doesn’t look or sound exactly like the man he’s playing, but he gets the puckish adversarial spirit, the born-entertainer braggadocio, down cold. This is the Muhammad Ali of legend, throwing jabs of rhyming, musical trash talk before letting his fists do the talking for him in the ring.
Liston, however, is unfazed. As he heads for the exit, he turns to answer the flurry of playful taunts: “Keep talking — I’ll f–k you up.” At that moment, Ali’s mask of insult-comic confidence slips a little. Smith lets us see a glimmer of the fear and uncertainty under his famous jocularity, and helps us understand how much that jokester routine was a strategic performance. Here, if only for a brief second, does a crack emerge in the magnetic public image of Muhammad Ali.
These days, it’s difficult to watch Ali, which is now streaming on Netflix, without thinking of the crack the film’s star recently put in his own public image. For most of his career, Will Smith has projected an unblemished charisma: approachable, good-humored, mostly wholesome. Few movie stars of the modern era have remained more devoted to staying squeaky clean in the public eye — an indefinite PR campaign that extends from the roles Smith has accepted to the radio hits he’s made to the mediated glimpses into his personal life he’s allowed. On Oscar night 2022, that campaign faltered with the slap heard round the planet. Right on the cusp of his greatest professional recognition, Smith lost the control he’s so long asserted over the way the world sees him.
You could call Ali an early attempt to deliberately reshape his reputation. It was, after all, the film that landed Smith his first Oscar nomination (two decades before King Richard made him an Oscar winner), and also the moment that the actor began alternating the mega-budget blockbusters on his resume with hefty dramatic roles. But did he see more than a bid for prestige and serious-actor bona fides in the role of the greatest boxer who ever lived? Could the story of a famous Black star under constant pressure to meet everyone’s expectations have resonated with the one-time king of the summer movie season?
Like most of the best biopics, Ali declines to offer a life story, opting instead to dramatize only a single significant decade of its subject’s career.
