If you want biographical details about Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, read a book. If you want a glorious new film that works like an impressionistic piece of jazz music touched by soul, watch Ali. Michael Mann's free-wheeling, syncopated masterwork is a magical conjuration of one of the most interesting men of the 20th century. Ali (which opens tomorrow) is not a sports flick, per se, although there is ring action. Ali is not even a socio-political document, although there is lots of that in it because Ali was persecuted by a war-mongering America at the height of the Vietnam debacle.
With the focus on 1964-74, the famed and now beloved boxer is depicted in a series of interlocking, overlayered scenes engineered and set to music. Mann and his team refuse to lay out a conventional biopic story on screen.
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