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| Tookey's Review |
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| Pro Reviews |
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| Mixed Reviews |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
1997 |
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| Genre: |
SPORTS
DOCUMENTARY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
85 |
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A reverential account of Muhammed Ali’s 1974 fight with George Foreman in Zaire.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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When We Were Kings is competently executed as hagiography, but it should have been more hard-hitting. That it won the Oscar for Best Documentary is mainly a sentimental tribute to Ali, who by the Nineties was ravaged by Parkinson’s disease. Here he comes across, in happier times, as handsome, articulate, funny and courageous, with an appealing line in self-mockery.
Twenty-three years in the making, Leo Gast’s film is worth seeing as a reminder of one of the century’s great sporting achievements, with evocative descriptions from journalists Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, who attended the fight.
However, Foreman is treated much less fairly than Ali - it’s as though the film-makers have decided he can’t be considered truly black. There’s no attempt, either, to query Ali’s merits as a role-model: his loudmouth statements, his espousal of Islam, his machismo, his responsibility for the rise of that exploitative boxing promoter Don King.
Ali is let off the hook over the fact that his greatest fight was financed by Zaire’s brutal dictator, President Mobutu. And there’s some mumbo-jumbo about Foreman being cursed by a female“succubus” (at which point there flash up pictures of the singer Miriam Makeba) which I found baffling and pretentious. And there’s no attempt at all to question the ethics of boxing.
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