‘Big George Foreman’ Review: Boxing Biopic Takes Middleweight Swing At Heavyweight Story
deadline.comSo often thought of primarily as the big lug who was so dramatically dispatched by Muhammad Ali in the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire in 1974, George Foreman is the main event in Big George Foreman.
While there is plenty of boxing here to satisfy sports fans, the film is mild-mannered and genial to a fault as it charts the life of a dirt-poor Texas kid with a devastating punch whose public image transformed over the years from hulking bogeyman to that of a good-natured businessman and man of God.
Ali was such a commanding, entertaining and (mostly) adored worldwide figure, from his emergence as the self-anointed “greatest” to his ultimate status as one of the most beloved and admired men on the planet, that it isn’t easy to watch him take a back seat here to a younger but less charismatic figure onscreen.
Eventually, if you like boxing and are willing to accept this as a sanitized and truncated version of the full story, it’s not hard to sit back and enjoy the eventful aspects of the big man’s life and his engaging personality, even if the film is inescapably a mere gloss on the full story.
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