Big George Foreman: Boxing biopic packs a punch but it’s a TV film of the week at best

Big George Foreman (12A, 129mins)

When Muhammad Ali returned from the exile imposed on him by his opposition to the Vietnam War, he found the field crowded with talented and terrifying opponents.

Chief among them Joe Frazier and George Foreman, with whom Ali would fight a string of legendary bouts.

If Ali was the mouth, the swaggering champ who seemed so much bigger than his sport, Foreman was the nice guy of heavyweight boxing, an affable giant who subsequently became a preacher, a millionaire businessman and a pillar of his community.

He too had a rags to riches story, and this mildly gushing biopic explores it.

​While Ali fought his way out of Louisville, Kentucky, George grew up in Marshall, Texas, one of six children raised by poor parents in a slum.

By his mid-teens, he’d drifted into street crimes and was going nowhere till he took up boxing. He was good at it, and at the 1968 Olympics, he won a gold medal, just as Ali had. And when he turned pro, he developed a fearsome reputation as a knockout specialist.

Muhammad Ali has had plenty of cinematic attention over the years, but now George gets his turn in the spotlight. George Tillman Jr’s rather basic biopic stars Khris Davis as the young George, who’s mad as hell and with good reason.

In early scenes, we see him mocked at school because he can’t afford any lunch. His mother Nancy (Sonja Sohn) does her best to make ends meet, but George and his siblings are raised in a shack, sometimes dividing a hamburger four ways for dinner.

All the same, his mother insists they say grace first. When George hits the big time, he’ll tell her, “God didn’t buy this food Mama, I did”, but will later alter his opinion on the Almighty.

His introduction to boxing came during a stint on a government job programme in California. One of the mentors, Doc Broadus (Forest Whitaker), notices Foreman’s simmering rage and decides to repurpose it: he’s a boxing coach and, in the space of just a year, has turned George from a blunt instrument into a serious heavyweight.

After winning Olympic gold against a much-favoured Russian, he turns professional and starts knocking out everyone in sight.

He cleaned Ken Norton’s clock, and knocked out the fearsome Joe Frazier to claim his world title. By the time George came to Kinshasa for a highly publicised bout with Mohammad Ali in the autumn of 1974, he was 40-0 and the overwhelming favourite.

Most of you will know what happened next, and if not, a fine documentary, When We Were Kings, will tell you. George got suckered into pummelling Ali round after round.

Ali wore him out, then sprung and knocked the big man down. Foreman’s world was shattered.

What’s interesting about Foreman is his heart, his spirit, his never-say-die optimism. A few years later, he had an epiphany when he collapsed after a boxing match: he saw God, he says, and subsequently became a preacher, even setting up his own church.

And George was the real deal, not some by-the-numbers Christian. He started a sports club in his neighbourhood, aimed at helping troubled kids like he’d once been.

When his financial adviser gambled away all George’s winnings, he forgave him.

George and Ali became great friends and spoke on the phone almost daily. And George would credit the Lord for giving him the strength to make a boxing comeback in his mid-40s and regain the heavyweight crown.

In many ways, Big George Foreman is a TV movie of the week, overly saccharine in its approach to its subject at times, and bogged down in its final third by an obligation to tick autobiographical boxes.

But the boxing scenes are well done, only a stone would be unmoved by George’s childhood, and the relationship between George and his trainer Doc Broadus is perhaps the most interesting one in the film.

And then there’s George himself, a remarkable man whose journey is hard not to respect.​

Rating: Three stars

Polite Society (15A, 104mins)

A heady mix of kung-fu and romcom, with a dash of Jane Austin thrown in, Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society stars Priya Kansara and Ritu Arya as Ria and Lena Khan, two sisters who dream big but live small.

Ria is still at school, but already preparing for a career as a martial arts movie stuntwoman. Her older sister Lena always dreamed of being a painter, but dropped out of art school and now sleeps late and lives on junk food.

Things change when Lena meets Salim Shah (Akshay Khanna), the much-sought-after son of their mother’s richest and most obnoxious friend, Raheela Shah (Nimra Bucha).

Though smarmy rich kids are hardly Lena’s type, she falls for the handsome Salim, and before you know it, a wedding has been arranged.

Ria is horrified, smells a rat, and sets out to disrupt the nuptials with the help of best friends Clara (Seraphina Beh) and Alba (Ella Bruccoleri).

That pair are quite the double act, and provide much of the film’s humour. And while the tone may be playful, a subplot involving genetic cloning pokes fun at arranged marriages. All in all, an enjoyable romp.

Rating: Three stars

The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry (15A, 108mins)

As English as cricket, buttered crumpets and warm beer, this amiable, meandering drama is based on a novel by Rachel Joyce and stars Jim Broadbent as a man who is not enjoying his retirement.

Harold Fry greets each day with a heavy sigh and seems hemmed in by the tidy Dorset house he shares with his wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton). One morning, Harold receives a letter from an old work colleague and friend: she’s dying in a Berwick-on-Tweed hospice and just wanted to say goodbye.

Moved and confused, Harold writes her a polite note, goes to post it and has a brainwave: instead of sending the letter, he will walk to the hospice and deliver it in person.

This will entail a weeks-long hike for which Harold is ill-prepared, but along the way, he finds perspective.

Broadbent has played these kinds of roles before, and does them very well, but Wilton blows him off the screen every time she appears.

Not much happens in this polite and underwhelming drama, but the acting of Wilton and Broadbent saves it.

Rating: Three stars