Certificate: 12A
Running Time: 129 mins
UK Distributor: Sony
WHO’S IN BIG GEORGE FOREMAN?
Khris Davis, Jasmine Mathews, John Magaro, Sullivan Jones, Lawrence Gilliard Jr., Sonja Sohn, Forest Whitaker, Shein Mompremier, Carlos Takam
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
George Tillman Jr. (director, writer), Frank Baldwin (writer), Peter Guber and David Zelon (producers), Marcelo Zavros (composer), John Matysiak and David Tattersall (cinematographers), Alex Blatt and Craig Hayes (editors)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
The life and career of heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman (Davis)…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON BIG GEORGE FOREMAN?
Whether you know him through his boxing achievements or his revolutionary fat-draining food grill, George Foreman is yet another public figure whose inspiring life story was tailor-made for big-screen drama. His well-documented tale of triumph, loss, turn to spirituality, and then triumph again is textbook hero’s journey stuff, and fair play to director and co-writer George C. Tillman for trying to encapsulate it all in his new biopic Big George Foreman, on which Foreman himself is listed as an executive producer.
However, as well-meaning and good-intentioned as it is, it is a heavily conventional and all too stuffy attempt to cram too much in all at once, making this very unique figure seem just as ordinary as anyone else.
Big George Foreman – wherein the titular character is portrayed by Khris Davis – covers numerous bases of Foreman’s life, beginning with his poverty-stricken childhood in 1960s Texas, before then discovering and excelling at boxing under legendary trainer Charles “Doc” Broadus (Forest Whitaker), eventually scoring an Olympic gold medal and the World Heavyweight Championship title after defeating Joe Frazier (Carlos Takam). However, soon after his famed defeat to challenger Muhammad Ali (Sullivan Jones), Foreman has one or two religious experiences and decides to retire from the sport and become a Baptist preacher, only to years later return to the ring and become the oldest boxer to reclaim the title at the age of 45.
The film is more or less a typical sports biopic, charting many of the highs and lows of the central figure’s life and career, while handily skipping over some of the more painful memories (only two of Foreman’s four wives are depicted on-screen here) as well as oddly dodging the ones that were actually more significant than the filmmakers perhaps realise (his famed grill is only mentioned in passing here). It doesn’t add much, if anything at all, to the established formula that is clearly being followed here, except to somehow make this person’s extraordinary life feel less so than it probably was. Because you’re already familiar with this type of story, whether you’ve been following Foreman’s career or have seen any other sports biopic ever, the turns that it wants to surprise the viewer with don’t land with quite as much impact as was intended, and it runs the risk of becoming a little dull, which is something that can’t exactly be said about the life that the actual George Foreman has lived.
With its later focus on Foreman’s conversion to Christianity, you can tell that Big George Foreman was made for a more faith-based crowd, which isn’t a problem in itself because the movie has some good morals that it wants to promote to its audience, and is nowhere near as hateful as some of the far more right-wing movies that dare to call themselves “religious”. However, it does mean that much of the writing, the direction, and even the acting never goes for anything harder than the softest of punches, and becomes inoffensive to a near fault. Some of the dialogue goes for full-on cheese in parts, and God bless Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker for delivering stock inspirational lines with the straightest of faces, while Tillman paces some scenes so slowly that you soon become more anxious to get to the fight than George Foreman is.
On that subject, there are parts where Khris Davis is genuinely giving an impressive performance, mostly during his earlier boxing career when he tends to go full Apollo Creed in both fighting style and hair-and-moustache combo, but others when you can tell that he’s merely acting, and stuck with more cheesy lines that, again, are designed only for the squeaky-clean audience to absorb. Davis overall does perfectly fine in the movie, but he is more often than not a victim of overly safe filmmaking that won’t allow him to fully explore his character’s wilder eccentricities, namely giving each of his sons the name George along with one daughter named Georgette, a fact that is footnoted into an already packed movie.
Like most warts-and-all biopics, the amount of story on display here would have probably been better suited for a miniseries rather than a two-hour film. Much more could have been explored about Foreman’s life, including his entrepreneurship with the George Foreman Grill or his friendship with former rival Muhammad Ali (which would have meant seeing more scenes being stolen by actor Sullivan Jones, who knocks his impression out of the park), throughout a number of hour-long episodes rather than in a contained feature which rushes and waters down much of it to its barest form.
As is, Big George Foreman is serviceable but ultimately formulaic fare that is unlikely to knock anyone out.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Big George Foreman is a serviceable but heavily conventional sports biopic that whizzes through the boxer’s unique life in unremarkably safe fashion, offering few surprises within its predictable template and leaving some of the more fascinating parts out almost entirely, which feels inadequate next to the actual George Foreman’s legacy.
Big George Foreman is now showing in cinemas nationwide
