MUHAMMAD ALI (2021) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Ken Burns
A Ken Burns documentary on the larger-than-life life of Muhammad Ali, the brash, controversial, lightning-fast heavyweight boxing champion, who proclaimed himself "the greatest," and then got in the ring and proved it. Burns is an admirer - not surprising, considering his career-long preoccupation with race - but the movie risks being too reverential. Burns acknowledges Ali's imperfections, most notably an ugly capacity for cruelty, but the talking-head witnesses, who include Bob Arum, Don King, Walter Moseley and Larry Holmes, come down squarely in Ali's corner. There's a lot of footage of Ali beating guys up and getting pounded, but no expert medical testimony about the role of all that pounding in his agonizing decline. Still, when you see him between the ropes, dancing and jabbing and taunting an opponent before delivering a knockout in the appointed round, one thing is clear: F0r a few years there, when the world was young and so was he, Ali really was the greatest.
