The extraordinary and long-gestating comeback story of heavyweight boxing champ George Foreman has taken a long time to tell, perhaps because he has lived his life in Muhammad Ali’s shade, especially since Ali’s sensational underdog victory over him in the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle. In movie terms, Leon Gast’s thrilling 1996 documentary When We Were Kings turned Foreman into the bad guy who deserved to lose – particularly the nasty macho detail about Foreman having a German shepherd on a lead when he turned up in Zaire for the fight.
That dog does not appear in this watchable, celebratory biopic from director and co-screenwriter George Tillman Jr, with Foreman credited as executive producer. Khris Davis plays Foreman; Forest Whitaker plays his trainer Doc Broadus and Sonja Sohn is his mother Nancy. The movie thumps through successive events of Foreman’s amazing life in efficient, unsubtle, on-the-nose style, skating over his many marriages a little.
We get his tough upbringing in Houston, Texas, where young Foreman is drawn into crime and shown hiding from cops under a house and smearing himself with the flow from the septic tank to put off the sniffer dogs; this is a rock-bottom moment. He joins a federally funded Job Corps skills camp in California where he is befriended by Broadus, who introduces him to boxing; Foreman wins gold at the Mexico Olympics in 1968, turns professional, defeats Joe Frazier but humiliatingly loses to Ali in Zaire. From there he spirals into depression, finds God, becomes a minister, but loses a lot of money in bad investments, endangering the youth centre he founded.
So poor George has to earn money somehow and here is where Ali, played by Sullivan Jones, looks a little bit mean in mocking Foreman when he’s down and out. But Foreman fronts an ad campaign for his own barbecue grill which becomes a licence to print money; even more staggeringly, Foreman returns to the ring and in 1994, at the age of 45 and by his own admission overweight, becomes world champion once again against a much younger opponent.
That gobsmacking late-life victory is something that I suspect the movie doesn’t really know what to do with; there is a preposterous and even comic element to it which doesn’t fit the classic underdog comeback template. Foreman was away from the ring for fully 10 years, and his determination to return to boxing slightly smudges, in narrative terms, the emotional impact of his earlier dedication to devoting his life to the Lord outside the ring, although the film is clear that he’s doing it to save that youth centre.
The movie might have been fiercer in showing Foreman’s humiliation and self-hate after the Ali debacle, and might even have shown Christianity and boxing as the two alternative vocations which presented Foreman with a dilemma. Well, it’s a ringside seat to an entertaining spectacle.
• Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World is released on 28 April in the US, UK and Ireland, and 20 July in Australia.
