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.
