Big George Foreman is a film directed by George Tillman Jr. starring Khris Davis.
Some movies simply wait for a great story to do all the work.
Foreman’s life was quite a story.
We can’t say the same for the film.
Movie Review
Some said the voiceover was anti-cinematic, and it was Scorsese (among others) who denied it film after film. This Big George Foreman wants to have a lot of Scorsese without achieving his pace, effectiveness and, above all, grace, and narrative freshness.
Big George Foreman is a film that resorts, at all times, to the obvious, to direct compassion, to that piece of American History a thousand times told in a thousand better ways and with more elaborate plots and less flat characters and, in the end, with more to say.
It is well executed technically, it knows how to behave, but the script’s compassionate tone and the heroic discourse of overcoming obstacles, the simplicity in its treatment and the absence of gray shades in a supposed real story, give it a tone of “easy” film that, undoubtedly, deserved a better treatment.
Biopics don’t usually give them, often limiting themselves to several scenes around which the script develops. It’s the same old song here, in a film that constantly resorts to the formula and remains easy in characters that, all good feelings, don’t end up curdling in its complexity.
Our Opinion
It’s a correct, predictable film that only wants to do things well.
But just with that, it’s not enough.
To use a very appropriate analogy for this occasion, the film lacks punch.
Director
George Tillman, Jr.
George Tillman, Jr. is an American film director and producer. He attended John Marshall High School in Milwaukee, where he took Mass Communications magnet classes. He graduated from Columbia College in Chicago in 1991 with a major in Film and Video. Tillman is most notable for directing the films Soul Food (1997) and Men of Honor (2000). He is also the producer of the Soul Food: The Series on television and the three films in the Barbershop series: Barbershop, Barbershop 2: Back in Business, and Beauty Shop. He also directed the 2009 biopic Notorious about the New York-born rapper Notorious B.I.G.
The Cast
Khris Davis / George Foreman
Sullivan Jones / Muhammad Ali
Jasmine Mathews / Mary Joan
Lawrence Gilliard Jr. / Archie Moore
John Magaro
Sam Trammell
Sonja Sohn
Forest Whitaker
Shein Mompremier
Robert Cicchini
