Ali

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * )

For all its flaws of overreaching ambition, lopsided structure and the knowledge it presumes about the famous life it considers, there is a shining redeeming feature to Ali the movie. It's Muhammad Ali the man as played by Will Smith.

His portrayal is as vivid and mesmerising as the film around him is oblique. After a while you forget that it's the Fresh Prince dancing gracefully across the ring or putting Ali's motormouth into high gear.

However, the film and its script never nails it the way Smith does, and Ali remains elusive and sporadically fascinating, rather than truly engaging.

Director Mann concentrated on 10 years in Ali's life - between the then Cassius Clay beating Sonny Liston for the world heavyweight title in 1964 at 22 and regaining it from George Foreman in 1974. But the film feels frustratingly ill-focused.

As it swings from those re-creations of Ali's famous moments to scenes depicting the man's eventful life outside the ring, it's less a conventional biopic, more an expressionist portrait.

It's rendered on, yes, a very big canvas - both Mann's trademark widescreen and the one in the ring. After an opening sequence which deftly cuts between a formative experience in Clay's childhood, a club performance by Sam Cooke, and the 22-year-old contender out jogging while being tailed by a police car, the first hour is gripping and evocative of the times. The re-creation of the Liston fight is a thrilling movie in itself.

But when Ali is stripped of the title after he refuses to be to be drafted ("Ain't no Vietcong ever called me nigger"), the movie seems to lose its way.

It doesn't help that, other than Jon Voight's uncanny role as sportscaster Howard Cosell, many of the supporting characters remain, at best, marginal figures. That's whether they are his two wives of the time, the men in his corner, or those other historical figures like Malcolm X (Mario van Peebles), Ali brushed up against as he became as much a political figure as a sporting champ.

And then comes, as the grand finale, the "Rumble in the Jungle" with Foreman.

Predictably Mann makes a spectacle of it, attempting to render the legendary bout even more mythical. It too makes a movie in itself. Actually it already has, the brilliant documentary When We Were Kings. As for this one, while Smith is a knock-out, Ali the movie just isn't the greatest.

Cast: Will Smith

Director: Michael Mann

Rating: M (violence, offensive language)

Running time: 156 mins

Screening: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas from Thursday