What's My Name: Muhammad Ali

A year or so before The Last Dance looked back at Michael Jordan and the Bulls, a lot of people were also praising this sports documentary which I missed at the time. There is a loose comparison to be made between the two because they do both focus on an icon of their sport/time, are delivered with plenty of input from the subject, and generally show how their subject was great, but also how they were flawed in some ways. Unlike Last Dance, which uses contributors looking back, What's My Name is built entirely of archive footage - with even the 'contributions' over the top of archive footage being taken from archive footage/recordings.

Although it is almost 3 hours long, it is engaging throughout, as it follows Ali from the start of his career through to the end and into the later stages of his life. There is plenty of good sports action, and the film chooses these wisely; for example it spends very little time on the Rumble in the Jungle fight, I assume because anyone watching this has almost certainly seen When We Were Kings, which focuses heavily on that fight. The footage selected generally is very well picked and edited. I'd not seen a lot of the material in this film, and I read that some has never been seen before. The editing is hugely impressive, not just the task of selecting material, but the feat of putting it together in a way that has such good flow and consistency - it works really well. Where it works is that it tells and shows a story of the man - very much warts and all. His elevation of racism, and his ability to talk about it in forums where it normally would not have been are well shown, but so too is the way he weaponised it inwards - against Joe Frazier in particular, one example being suggesting Frazier won on points due to him being a "good boy" (the 2008 film Thrilla in Manila is a good one to see the impact on Frazier of this type of assault. There is plenty like this in here and it shows his cruelty.

The aging process is really clearly shown too; it is almost hard in the second part to watch Ali slow down so much, and continue fighting after his prime and as it must have been doing significant damage to him. His motivations and political work were clear, but still. So overall more than the celebration / retrospective that I had expected it to be. It has a lot more edge in its presentation, making it a better film, and doing so on top of a great feat of footage selection and use.