WHEN WE WERE KINGS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(Gramercy) A documentary by Leon Gast. Producers: Taylor Hackford, Leon Gast, David Sonenberg. MPAA Rating: Not Rated (brief nudity, profanity, boxing violence) Running Time: 90 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Twenty years removed from the events it chronicles, WHEN WE WERE KINGS takes on an ironic resonance. Leon Gast's documentary account of the 1974 heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire ("The Rumble in the Jungle") offers a vision of the two combatants worlds removed from the way we see them today: the brash, flashy Ali has become the frail man who lit the Olympic flame in Atlanta, while the intimidating, taciturn Foreman has become a self-deprecating teddy bear in commercials and sit-coms. A study of two figures from the glory days of boxing is only part of what WHEN WE WERE KINGS tries to deliver, however, and it is only the chance to see Ali at his verbal and physical finest which grips you while much of the film drifts off on tangents.
Part of Gast's focus in WHEN WE WERE KINGS involves the extraordinary nature of the event itself. Then-fledgling promoter Don King not only managed to get $5 million for each fighter; he turned the fight into an occasion for an all-out festival of Afro-centrism, bringing black American performers like James Brown, B. B. King and the Spinners to Zaire for a concert. Ali, whose confrontational politics and conviction for draft evasion had enraged mainstream Americans, was thrilled to be fighting in a black country where he was viewed as a great hero. Foreman, meanwhile, could not understand why he was treated like the villain, or worse, ignored entirely. In fact, the few locals who greeted his plane were surprised to discover that the heavyweight champion was black himself.
Gast frequently moves back and forth between preparation for the fight itself and peripheral events, but this technique ends up muddling WHEN WE WERE KINGS about as often as it enriches it. The musical clips inserted throughout the film do little to build a mood, and there is a randomness to their inclusion which makes it unclear where they fit chronologically (especially considering the five week delay between the originally-scheduled fight date and the actual fight caused by a sparring injury to Foreman's eye). That kind of incompleteness is common in WHEN WE WERE KINGS, as Gast introduces a situation then fails to follow up on it. An air conditioning failure at the musicians' hotel has everyone in a tizzy, but we never hear about it again; the anecdotes involving extreme measures taken by Zaire's dictator Mobutu Sese Seko to clean up the country for foreign press are interesting, but Gast doesn't tell us how the delay affected those efforts.
It also doesn't help that Gast can't quite decide whether WHEN WE WERE KINGS is a piece of social history or a piece of sports history. The back story for the fight is fascinating, with the past-his-prime Ali facing the younger, stronger Foreman no one believed he could beat, and commentary by sports journalists Norman Mailer and George Plimpton provides solid background for the context of the fight in the careers of the two combatants. Yet Gast appears to deal with the actual fight as a necessary evil, or as padding to fill out a documentary about something else which was struggling to make feature length. It is indicative of how little he understands the most important single aspect of the fight -- Ali's "Rope-a-Dope" tactic which allowed him to tire out Foreman, and eventually knock him out in the 8th round -- that there is never a moment in which anyone analyzes who developed the strategy, or why Ali went to it only after a first round attempt at right hand leads was unsuccessful.
WHEN WE WERE KINGS might be a few different documentaries crammed into one film, but it still delights whenever Muhammad Ali is center stage. More than anything else, Gast wants the film to act as a memorial to the charismatic Ali who never failed to provide a quote or a headline. The portrait that emerges captures Ali at his cocky, trash-talking, rhyme-spinning finest, but it also shows the deeply committed Muslim who viewed his trip to Zaire as a kind of pilgrimage. Ali in 1974 was one of the world's greatest entertainers, love him or hate him, and WHEN WE WERE KINGS offers another chance to see him when he was a king. Leon Gast should have known Ali was the best thing he had going for him, but often it seems that the real fight in WHEN WE WERE KINGS is between Gast and his material.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 bout faces: 5.
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