Where i Watched It: Netflix

English Audio Description?: Yes

Narrated By: Elaine Joseph

2023 already had one solid boxing film with Creed 3. Having something like that in mind, fresh, going into Big George Foreman does not help this poorly directed biopic at all. George Tillman Jr has managed some interesting films in the past, like The Hate You Give, but I really don’t know how this film is this bad.

George Foreman once again is beaten by Ali, who had a much more successful and higher quality biopic starring Will Smith, who went on to earn an Oscar nomination. Here, Tillman Jr chooses a relatively unknown actor to play George, and then lets his movie fall apart.

It would seem like George Foreman had an interesting life. He had a rough patch that he had to work through. He didn’t just start selling grills. But, the exploration of this life is so heavy handed on cause and effect. In one scene, the audio description lets us know before he joins a class, that he is older than his classmates. When the teacher calls on someone to read, George wants to, but so does another kid. She literally looks at the way the two kids are presented, and chooses the one with nice shoes. The result of her decision? Alcoholism. The immediate next scene is George hitting the bottle.

And it’s not just that one scene, Tillman’s awful direction is everywhere. When George heads off to military school, he finds a brand new box of Chuck Taylors in his pack as a gift from his mom. Shoebox and everything. Do you know how big a shoebox is to try and hide that shit in his duffel bag? But, he has to have the box, so he can pull it out in front of everyone to reveal just how new the shoes are… so of course they get stolen.

When George gets fat and then needs to lose weight, we see him in a montage of all sorts of things, like chopping wood and pulling a Jeep down a road with a harness. Then he sits down for breakfast and is so excited for pancakes, you’d think he was reenacting a scene from Rainman. I don’t know how many times he says pancakes, but it’s so obvious that the only reason this exists, is so he doesn’t get pancakes.

Since the film was picked up by Affirm Films, Sony’s Christian label, there’s even some clunky ways of twisting in religion. It’s not nearly as well done as a film like American Underdog. It feels like God was added in post-production.

Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker shows up, for his paycheck, as another awfully written character. He’s mad at George for breaking down a door to get to the guy who stole his shoes. That’s the takeaway his brilliant future mentor took away from that exchange. Fuck the thief, what about that door? I’m not even certain the thief was punished at all. I’m not even sure George got to go back to his bunk and retrieve his stuff.

john Megarro is a bright spot as the film’s token non-racist white guy. There’s a lot of racism in this, and Megarro is repping for those of us who aren’t angry at George for simply existing.

The good news is that the audio description is fantastic. It’s actually better than the film. The description is really detailed. I was able to follow all the scenes previously listed because the audio description had such a high attention to detail. Like, they weren’t just a new pair of sneakers, but they were Chuck Taylors. Long before there was ever an Air Jordan, there were Chucks.

The one thing I’ll say positively about the movie is that I never had a problem with the acting. most of what you might think is an acting issue, really is just a bad screenplay, made worse by some truly terrible direction. I don’t know what was happening to Tillman Jr while he was uncharacteristically directing the worst film of his career, but I hope he gets the help he needs.

Final Grade: D