BIG GEORGE FOREMAN - Mark Reviews Movies

Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World, Sony Pictures Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 28, 2023

The first hour or so of Big George Foreman is a reasonable, if rushed and familiar, biography of the eponymous boxer, who quickly rose to fame and glory, only to be undone after an unexpected loss. To be fair to the man, that loss was to Muhammad Ali in an upset, and one imagines George Foreman had to have realized it wasn't the kind of upset to send one into such a spiral of self-doubt. We're talking about Ali, after all.

It's a lot more interesting to speculate about Foreman in the midst of this movie, because it doesn't seem particularly interested in him as anything more than a boxer, capable of rising and falling and coming back against the odds, and a born-again Christian, which led him to reconsider a career of throwing and taking punches before becoming a preacher. Co-writer/director George Tillman Jr.'s movie finds something of a sweet spot between telling a story and setting out to do some preaching of its own. That doesn't change the fact that, as soon as the movie switches gears toward Foreman's faith, the narrative loses a sense of purpose and consistency.

That first half of the movie, at least, does feel as if it has some purpose, although its major sense of consistency in hitting all of the predictable, shallow beats of a generic biography and sports story. An adult George (Khris Davis) announces, by way of narration that only reappears in the second half when the real race to get through the significant parts of his life arrives, that he died at the age of 28. We'll eventually get to the near-death experience, but for a while, Tillman and co-screenwriter Frank Baldwin take us from his childhood, living in poverty in Houston, to the highs of his early career.

While it might not reveal much, the movie focuses on the notion of George as an aimless young man, filled with anger about feeling different from and disrespected by the rest of the world. After dropping out of school and heading toward a life of crime, a teenage George (Davis plays him from that point onward, although facial hair and hairstyles—or the lack thereof later—do most of the work) finds some semblance of order and a path in his life by enlisting in Job Corps. There, he meets Charles "Doc" Broadus (Forest Whitaker), a boxing coach who sees some potential in the young man—and sees a lot more of it whenever George lands a punch.

There's not much more that's noteworthy here, beyond Foreman's accomplishments in the ring being portrayed with some decently shot box sequences, which give us a sense of the man's skill and eventual downfall as a heavy-hitter, and hints of a marriage to Paul (Shein Mompremier) collapsing on account of infidelity. Much of this is akin to a dramatized highlight reel, although it's almost too appropriate that the main subject of the movie is overshadowed as soon as Sullivan Jones first appears as the fighter who will give George his first defeat. The actor's Ali is a real highlight here, which is no small task, either in channeling the most iconic boxer in history or in diverting so much attention from the central figure of a movie.

The second half sees George, a man who loses touch with the faith instilled in the family by their mother Nancy (Sonja Sohn), have two "miraculous" experiences. The second has him nearly dying in the locker room after a fight, and despite what's probably a couple trips to the doctor away from a rational explanation, George believes it to be a religious awakening.

At this point, the whole tone of the movie changes—not necessarily in that it starts sermonizing, but in that it almost comes across as the gimmicky premise for a sitcom. There's Big George, testifying on street corners, as onlookers wonder when he's going to fight again, or at home with his new wife Mary Joan (Jasmine Mathews), eating oatmeal instead of pancakes to lose some pounds so that he can get back in the ring to save the local gym he runs. All that's missing is a laugh track—or, maybe, the movie taking the character, his convictions, and the contradictory necessity of him returning to fighting for a good cause a bit more seriously.

If the first hour of Big George Foreman feels as if it's in a hurry to get to the man's conversion, the second half feels as if it's in an even greater rush to get back to the boxing ring. This is a movie that doesn't quite know what it wants to do, except to give us the basics of a story that probably deserves more.

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