129 min | PG-13 | April 28, 2023 | Sony Pictures Releasing
George Foreman beats the world, finds God, walks away, and climbs back into the ring at forty-five to do it again. The story is incredible. The movie never trusts you to notice without a push.
George Tillman Jr. tells the life of George Foreman from the streets of Houston to two heavyweight title reigns separated by twenty years. The young Foreman is angry and poor. A trainer points that anger at a heavy bag. The film tracks his rise to Olympic gold, his loss to Muhammad Ali, his religious awakening, and his improbable return to the ring in middle age. This is a biopic that treats every chapter of a remarkable life as a station on the road to redemption.
Khris Davis plays Foreman across four decades and finds the contradictions in the man. He is menacing as the young brawler and gentle as the older preacher. Davis builds the physical transformation through posture and voice rather than makeup. Forest Whitaker plays trainer Doc Broadus with weary patience and a fixed belief in the kid nobody else wants. Sullivan Jones plays Muhammad Ali with a showman’s swagger and just enough cold focus to suggest the fighter underneath. Sonja Sohn plays Nancy Foreman with a quiet exhaustion that the script keeps shoving to the margins.
Tillman directs the screenplay he wrote with Frank Baldwin as a chain of inspirational set pieces. The boxing scenes are staged for impact rather than realism. Each decisive punch arrives with a slow-motion push and a surge of music that instructs the audience exactly how to feel. A gospel-inflected score underlines every spiritual turn before the actors get a chance to play it. The result sands the rough edges off a man whose life had plenty of them.
Foreman’s real story carries everything a film needs. Poverty, violence, faith, failure, and a comeback nobody believes possible. The movie has all of it and trusts none of it to land without a nudge. Tillman reaches for uplift in every scene and never sits still long enough to let a single moment breathe. The man deserves a harder, stranger film than this one.