'ALI' GOES THE DISTANCE BUT FAILS TO SCORE KO.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Critic

``Ali'' is Michael Mann's admirable attempt to not just capture the man known as the Greatest, but to delineate the forces that Ali helped create during his most prolific and tumultuous decade on the cultural landscape.

But while the movie boasts the great one-two punch of Mann's impressionistic direction and Will Smith's thrilling performance as the Champ, ``Ali'' the movie remains as elusive as its subject was in the boxing ring. It has plenty of great moments, but sorely lacks the cohesiveness needed to connect the dots into a satisfying portrait.

Mann, working from a script credited to five different writers (a sign that this project has been bouncing around a long time), signals his intentions for the movie in its opening half hour. Cutting between Sam Cooke (David Elliott) singing ``Bring It on Home to Me'' in a nightclub and shots of a lithe, 22-year-old Cassius Clay (as Ali was then known) preparing for his championship bout with Sonny Liston, Mann also intersperses glimpses of his subject's Louisville, Ky., childhood. We see the small child, riding in the back of a segregated bus, newspaper images of a lynching being seared into his brain.

It's a bravura beginning to this ambitious film and for the next two hours, Mann struggles to maintain that balance between biography and cultural history as he focuses on Ali's life from 1964-74. All the highlights are touched upon: Ali's fights with Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman; two of Ali's marriages; his conversion to Islam; his friendships with the disparate likes of Malcolm X (Mario Van Peebles) and Howard Cosell (a dead-on Jon Voight); his draft resistance and subsequent pariah status.

But ``Ali'' never quite succeeds in getting inside's his subject's head. Mann is so intent on not making a crowd-pleasing Hollywood biopic that he frequently downplays the events outside the ring, giving us a subdued portrait of a man who was (and continues to be) larger than life. This is the rare example of a Hollywood movie where more, not less, would indeed be more.

You can't blame Smith. This is a performance that's so good in so many ways, yet you can't help but shake the feeling that many people are going to take it for granted. Beyond getting the speech patterns and the physical mannerisms right, Smith so internally inhabits Ali that, when the movie lets him, he provides a convincingly intimate glimpse of the man in his most private of moments. And his work in the boxing ring is nothing short of bravura.

Sadly, all of the movie's strong points never coalesce into a film that feels complete. Still, the fragments of Ali's life that the movie does provide manage to give us a tantalizing look at a man whose life seemingly defies summation. ``Ali'' may not be the greatest, but it's not half bad.

``ALI''

(Rated R: some language and brief violence)

The stars: Will Smith, Mario Van Peebles, Jon Voight, Jamie Foxx, Ron Silver, Jeffrey Wright, Jada Pinkett Smith, Nona Gaye.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Michael Mann. Screenplay by Stephen J. Rivele & Christopher Wilkinson and Eric Roth & Michael Mann. Story by Gregory Allen Howard. Released by Columbia Pictures.

Running time: Two hours, 34 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three stars

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

Muhammad Ali (Will Smith, center) rarely spent time out of the spotlight, but ``Ali'' portrays some of his private moments.