Directed By George Tillman Jr

Starring – Khris Davis, Jasmine Matthews, Forest Whitaker

The Plot – Follows the remarkable life and times of Foreman (Davis), from Olympic Gold medalist to World Heavyweight champion, from the Rumble in the Jungle fight with Muhammad Ali (Sullivan Jones) in Zaire to finding his faith, retiring, and becoming a preacher. When financial hardship hits his family and church, he steps back into the ring and regains the championship at age 45, becoming the oldest heavyweight champion in boxing history.

Rated PG-13 for some sports violence

BIG GEORGE FOREMAN – Official Trailer (HD) – YouTube

POSITIVES

I’ve never been so thankful to see Forest Whitaker in a film in my entire life, but his work here above the rest of the mundane performances feels Oscar-worthy by comparison, especially since he’s the only actor who conjures a palpable screen presence or influential energy, despite his screen time dwindling the longer the film persists. Whitaker supplants each scene with a much-needed dose of intensity and integrity that feels like a breath of fresh air any time he’s called upon, and in his relationship with George, solidifies the closest to an influential father figure that the former heavyweight champion of the world has ever known, transcribing Whitaker’s Doc with an element of profound knowledge that sets George on the right path. Besides Whitaker, the make-up designs themselves are a bit inconsistent, but where they do actually resonate effectively upon what they’re pulled from is the naturalizing of the aging, which through a thirty year timeline is realized a subtlety that continuously breeds believability. The fact that a biopic is aging their characters at all is appreciative, but when pulled off in ways that evolve and age the figure effectively without downright obscuring them, zeroes in on the confines of time, which play all the more vividly towards George’s own second chapter comeback at the age of 45. Lastly, my favorite scenes of the film are easily George’s own attempt to make money through the less than glorious venture of television advertising, which in turn created a fitting irony towards his own secondary career. The film doesn’t spend a lot of time on the George Foreman grill, but George’s own lack of education combined with his own simple-minded innocence crafts a couple of creative gags in the laughs department, with shades of Rocky Balboa reading a men’s cologne ad only weeks after taking Apollo Creed to the limit.

NEGATIVES

Imagine how interchangeable a majority of these sports biopics are in structure and storytelling. Now imagine how much worse they would be with television levels of production value at their consistency, and you have “Big George Foreman”. This movie is distracting for a variety of reasons, but particularly the artificiality and manufactured outlines of some truly lifeless backgrounds, which frequently overwhelm the already stiff and slow in-ring boxing sequences with a mostly post-edited audience in wide angle shots that often don’t match or react to the beats of the conflict persisting within the ring they’re watching. Beyond this, the lighting of the film gives a condemning aura of cheapness to the presentation, which constantly undercuts its ambition to small scale, abandoning any sense of compelling style or cinematic merit to a film that is constantly fighting an uphill climb throughout a two hour run time. On that front, the film’s screenplay is an overbloated mess of every single moment from George Foreman’s life, with a strange consistency in pacing that somehow always makes the film feel boring, despite rushing through every notable instance with the kind of velocity that gives each of these scenes a Mandela effect, to which we wonder if they ever even happened in the first place. This is where the film desparately requires the most help because it spends more than an opening hour on George before he became a pro boxer, then shoe-horns a thirty year career into the movie’s last hour, which undercuts the elements of the story that everyone came to see. From there, the film becomes a religious exploitation film of sorts, as George’s relationship to God leaves him the beneficiary of so many miracles that saved his life. I don’t personally have a problem with that included, especially since it’s a big part of George’s life, but the way it’s forced into the confines of a very specific and pivotal time in Foreman’s life requiring more emphasis to flesh-out, makes it feel completely out of left field, using it more as a plot device for certain resolutions that it can’t explain any other way except for faith. As for those moments of aforementioned physical conflict, they persist without an ounce of drama to their engagement, with each respective fight both shot and performed without any of the grit, urgency or immersive captivity of “Creed” or even a mediocre boxing film of the last twenty-five years. In fact, the sequences themselves are so underwhelming in execution that they’re easily the biggest weakness of the film, and the kind that you wish would stop interrupting the elements of George’s life outside of the ring, which begin to overcome on-the-nose dialogue and wooden acting before they’re continuously thrown back into obligation. Besides Whitaker, whom I praised in the positives, the rest of the cast don’t even come close to living up to their monumental figures, especially Davis as the titular Foreman, whose performance feels more like an impression instead of a portrayal. I say that because the only thing Davis has down is the voice of Foreman, as to where his emotionality and charisma tragically undersell the magnitude of his character, in turn never allowing me to see him as the character he was playing, despite the film so forcefully reminding me of the fact, often. Finally, I found the lack of influence of George’s surrounding family members, particularly his children, to be a grave disappointment, especially considering it’s the only chance that the movie has to coherently illustrate the kind of family man that George was to twelve kids by four different women. That in itself creates a bit of a compromise on truthful endeavors, as everything about George’s infidelity is only hinted at throughout the narrative, and when combined with the lack of desire to pursue some of the figures that sprung from them, leaves this biopic feeling a bit incomplete in the corresponding bigger picture.

OVERALL
“Big George Foreman” isn’t able to go the distance, with it constantly fighting off a barrage of biopic tropes and a bloated screenplay on overload that continuously gets the best of it. Though George’s underdog story lends itself entirely to be told on the big screen, the results are a bit underwhelming and uninspired in execution, leaving the latest sports biopic without a slugger’s chance of overcoming the odds and taking home the gold.

My Grade: 3/10 or D-