The official title of Big George Foreman (now streaming on Netflix) is a rather impressive triple-mouthful: Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World. One assumes that rambling padooka of a subtitle is aimed at a younger generation of potential viewers who might need a reminder that Foreman was a famous boxer before he was an even-more-famous spokesperson for a gazillion-selling kitchen gadget; one also assumes it uses the word “miraculous” because it’s pretty much a faith-based movie. Director George Tillman Jr.’s biopic, produced by Foreman himself, aims to show us the multitudes within the boxer/preacher/pitchman, his transformation from Muhammad Ali’s scowling antagonist to smiling face on infomercials – but the movie further underscores why biopics shouldn’t try to span multiple decades in a person’s life.
The Gist: “I was 28 years old when I died.” George Foreman (Khris Davis) says this in voiceover at the very beginning of the movie, and one can only assume he didn’t stay dead, since a title card says this is Based On A True Story (that makes it a BOATS movie, y’know) and in True Stories, people just don’t narrate from the Great Beyond. We’ll eventually get to the scene where he “died,” but first, we have to start with George’s poverty-stricken childhood in Houston, when he’s played by Kei Rawlins. His family has just moved into a battered home, where he and his siblings split a single hamburger for dinner. His mother Nancy (Sonja Sohn) begs of him, on his first day at a new school, to not get held back again or get into any more fights, and he keeps his promise for a minute or three before he’s taunted into throwing a punch. This happens a lot in this movie – not the punches, although the story of a boxer inevitably must depict that, but the setting up of a scenario so it can be knocked down so the movie can expeditiously move on to the next biographical high or low point.
“Anger was my answer to everything,” George narrates as we leap forward a few years, where Davis looks way too old to be playing a teenager, but nevermind, we just have to move on. He and a friend routinely mug drunks on the street, and one misadventure finds himself hiding in a sewage drain and smearing waste all over himself so the K-9 unit won’t sniff him out. He straightens up to join the Job Corps in California, where he meets two key figures in his life, Dez (John Magaro), the boozing pal who’ll “take care” of George’s finances after he becomes a famous boxer (no spoilers, but you know what’s coming), and Doc Broadus (Forest Whitaker), the man who’ll introduce George to boxing. The first time George gets into a ring, Doc bellows, “You stand there like a statue, then a pigeon is gonna crap on you!”, which is solid advice no matter the context.
It’s clear the boy needs some discipline if he’s going to put his significant fighting skills – including a bomb of a hook that could make a silverback gorilla shrug – to good use in a controlled setting. Cue the jump rope/heavy bag/speed bag montage then a narrative leap to his gold medal win in the 1968 Olympics, to his meeting his first wife Paula (Shein Mompremier), to his first professional fight, to his 11-0 record, to his wedding, to his 36-0 record, and I think the montages are starting to blur together? The narrative slows down a bit to dramatize his upset of Joe Frazier to win the heavyweight title and to prove that this is the type of movie that would never, ever consider not casting an actor to mimic Howard Cosell so he can deliver the iconic line, “Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!”
This only gets us to 1973; we’re 45 minutes into the movie and it’s gonna cover a couple more decades of George’s life. It encompasses the amazing Rumble in the Jungle against Muhammad Ali (Sullivan Jones) and his retirement from boxing to be a preacher and another marriage (this story skips a few of the real George’s marriages) and his investment in a youth center and his financial hardship and his unlikely return to boxing despite his significant paunch, etc., etc. Somewhere in there, he “dies” after a boxing match and then undies – what exactly happened there? Who knows! – which reaffirms his long-lost faith in Jesus. This guy had quite a life, eh?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It might be interesting to contrast the George Foreman in this sanitized biopic – that casts Muhammad Ali as a villain of sorts, at least temporarily – with the documentary Muhammad Ali: When We Were Kings, which frames George as the antagonist. Otherwise, it’s a mildly disappointing tries-to-do-too-much biopic like Whitney Houston vehicle I Wanna Dance With Somebody or generic Roberto Duran boxing bio Hands of Stone. (You may recall that Whitaker also played a boxing trainer, in the fictional story Southpaw.)
Performance Worth Watching: Newcomer Davis – who previously had small roles in Judas and the Black Messiah and Space Jam: A New Legacy – is occasionally uncanny in his depiction (imitation?) of Foreman, and shows enough talent to inspire interest in his future work, hopefully in a less formulaic film.
Memorable Dialogue: George laments what happened in the ring with Ali: “The rope-a-dope. And I was the dope.”
Sex and Skin: None! Even though George had 12 children!
Our Take: BGF: TMSOTOAFHCOTW suffers from a classic And Then approach to biopic plotting: This happened, and then that happened, and then another thing happened, and then his life changed forever. Screenwriters Tillman and Frank Baldwin introduce a tidy little conflict and then it’s solved and then they introduce the next conflict and then it’s solved, and then you realize this story of an extraordinary life flows like a two-hour drive on a road with a speed bump every hundred yards. No matter how compelling Foreman’s life was, it’s hard to develop much dramatic momentum that way.
Such choppiness is papered over by a troublesome storytelling technique many faith-based films often fail to avoid: that the main character’s devotion to Christianity is enough of an arc to hold an unwieldy narrative together. In this telling of Foreman’s life, his spirituality is his greatest constant, instilled in him by his mother, stewing in the background of his relatively godless early adulthood, re-emerging after he has a near-death experience. But beyond his inevitably intense devotion to his god, who is George Foreman? What did he do with the anger the movie tells us fueled his boxing career and was a constant in his life? The answers we get just aren’t particularly satisfying.
The movie plays like his Wikipedia entry, covering all the bases without the intimacy of character it needs to inspire our emotional investment: he won some fights, lost some fights, met a woman, had some children, divorced a woman, restarted his career, met another woman, had more children, ran out of money, re-restarted his career, came into more money, and what he thinks and feels about all this, and how he is as a father or husband or friend is addressed in only the most perfunctory, superficial manner. That he’s a man of God is only enough to carry the movie if you’re a person of God yourself, and even then, it’s no guarantee that anyone will be as inspired by this movie as it so desperately wants us to be. Big George is a watchable film, with slickly photographed boxing sequences, notable period detail and little charismatic bursts from Whitaker, Sohn, Jones and Davis. But as is typical with many biopics, its attempt to do too much results in not nearly enough.
Our Call: I spent the better part of two hours wondering WHEN ARE THEY GONNA GET TO THE GRILL, and then it’s basically tossed in there thoughtlessly, rendered a mere footnote. Maybe we should be glad this isn’t another “birth of the brand” BOATS drama, but ultimately it’s just another reason to SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.