The former boxer George Foreman’s late-20th-century popularity as a television pitchman for a line of cooking products has enabled a collective amnesia. That is, we’ve forgotten just how extraordinary his sports career was. Boxing has given us many fighters who have won world champion titles more than once. But Foreman won his first heavyweight title bout in 1973. And after a long period, during which he had sworn to have lost interest in the sport, he came back and won another title in 1994, age 45.
Wow — sounds like somebody ought to make a movie out of that. Too bad “Big George Foreman,” directed by George Tillman, Jr., is so shockingly flat. Subtitled “The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World,” it’s a movie with its heart in the right place and its sense of drama nowhere in sight. It begins with Foreman’s hunger-and-anger-driven youth. Enlisted in a jobs program, Foreman — played by the charismatic Khris Davis in a decades-spanning depiction — finds a mentor and trainer in Doc Broadus (Forest Whitaker, doing his low-key best with a character who’s no more or less underdeveloped than every other one here). George, who can wallop like no other boxer, almost obliviously moves from strength to strength.
Until the fight against Muhammad Ali in Zaire, in which Ali took the heavyweight crown from Foreman. Rendered in world-historical terms in the 1997 documentary “When We Were Kings,” here it’s depicted as a career calamity for Foreman: his first loss, one he took hard.
Plot twist: Foreman found God and gave up boxing for preaching. With a second wife, he started a new family, and founded a youth center, which contained a room dedicated to his former rival Ali. But a series of business calamities — rendered here as the screw-up of the single feckless and alcoholic school pal he’d put in charge of his finances — forced him to pick up the gloves again.
All these events and more are rendered with a seeming undercurrent of we’ve-got-a-lot-to-cram-in-here jitters, and that’s not even the worst of it. The script, by the director and Frank Baldwin, is a thicket of dialogue clichés replete with exchanges like “I want you” and “You have me!” The choreography of the fight scenes is uninspired. They’re shot, as so many boxing scenes now are, with heavy “Raging Bull” influence and a thorough misunderstanding of Scorsese’s approach in that film. His slow motion/fast motion alternation and camera-practically-in-the-glove shots weren’t meant to convey exciting action but to accentuate the brutal physical punishment boxers give and receive. The movie not only doesn’t do Foreman justice, it leaves Davis and the rest of the appealing cast on the ropes.
Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World
Rated PG-13 for sports violence. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters.
