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How others will see it. There are two different groups of audiences: those who are old enough to remember something of Muhammad Ali, those who know him primarily as a man with severe motor control problems; those who see Ali as a positive role model, or even as a hero, and those who would like to see him shut his trash-talking trap. Remember, modesty is a virtue, at least until you take your first Marketing class. Then you learn that relentlessly pushing yourself generally succeeds better than simply paying your dues. Too bad.
The documentary combines ample footage from 1974 with voiceovers and interview segments circa 1996. In some ways, this is a positive, because it allows for comments on Ali and Foreman later in life. Foreman eventually re-invented himself as a Christian boxer and an amiable grill salesman. Ali partly retreated from the public eye, or more likely it was the other way around, since his Parkinson's disease visually overwhelms any other message he can send to the camera. On the other hand, the voiceovers and 1996 interview segments take away from the "you are there" impact of the 1974 footage.
The Kinshasha, Zaire bout was an event, supported by a remarkable concert package that included James Brown, B.B. King, The Spinners, and the Crusaders. Hopefully, the footage of the concerts themselves will someday be made available to the public. Snippets of these concerts show up in When We Were Kings, but only enough to make us wish for more.
How I felt about it. Give him his due. Muhammad Ali was cagey. He knew that he could not stand toe to toe with Foreman and exchange blows. Foreman was a devastating puncher who had quickly dispensed with the only two fighters Ali had previously lost to, Joe Frazier and Ken Norton. Ali's plan, or so he said, was to "dance" around Foreman, circling him and delivering rapid punches. Ali extolled his dancing plan to such lengths that Foreman's training concentrated on cutting off the ring.
In the fight itself, Ali never danced at all. He spent the first round sizing Foreman up, and learned that his hand speed was an insufficent advantage compared to Foreman's prodigious punches. He then went to the rope-a-dope, a then novel approach to deflect as much punishment as possible while waiting for Foreman to tire. After all, Foreman had never been in the ring for fifteen rounds before.
The key to the success of this strategy is that only Ali knew he was going to the ropes. It worked. Once Foreman was spent, Ali left the ropes and mixed it up with Foreman. But now his hand speed was a supreme advantage, and the mighty Foreman fell. After a loss to Jimmy Young, Foreman went into a lengthy retirement, but made a comeback in the late 1980s and eventually reclaimed the heavyweight title in 1994 at the age of 45.
But When We Were Kings is about more than Ali and his fight with Foreman. It also shows how Africans felt about Ali, and shows the overwhelming influence dictator Mobutu held over Zaire at the time of the fight.