65
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
25(64%)
mixed
14(36%)
negative
0(0%)
Showing 39 Critic Reviews
90
Ali is a bruiser, unwieldy in length and ambition. But Mann and Smith deliver this powerhouse with the urgency of a champ's left hook.
88
It's one of the most ambitious biographical films ever made in this country, and one of the most unusual, moving and exciting.
80
Michael Mann is a fluent, evocative filmmaker, and the movie is well written, expertly staged, and beautifully edited. [24 & 31 Dec 2001, p. 126]
80
We see the movie levitate when Ali and Brown chant, "Float like a butterfly," the slogan that takes on a different meaning in each context, starting off as hopeful and spry, finally becoming rueful and pointed. When the film pulls off moments like these, it's breathtaking -- a near great movie.
80
A thoughtful epic is both a rarity and an oxymoron. But that's what Ali is, and you can't help being drawn sympathetically into its hero's struggle for mastery of himself and his era.
80
Ali boasts a whole tribe of outstanding secondary performances, of which Jon Voight's Cosell, in an outrageous rug and several tons of pasty-face makeup, is easily the funniest.
80
Ali becomes less the story of a boxer than the story of one man hanging onto his soul. With so many wrong ways to dramatize that process, Mann's approach seems all the more right.
80
It may not scale the heights of Heat or The Insider, but this is riveting stuff and reconfirms Mann's status as a master of the medium.
75
What keeps the movie from championship status is a sense that the filmmakers see Ali's social and political contributions as extra added attractions, ultimately less important than his greatness in the ring.
75
Connects so often and so persuasively that its shortcomings -- the movie goes slack from time to time -- really don't amount to much.
