The Greatest review – Amazon’s sturdy Muhammad Ali series is a tale told too many times

There are small pleasures to be had in this straightforward retelling of the boxing champ’s life but there’s not much most viewers haven’t seen before

The Greatest is a new limited series that repackages the life of Muhammad Ali for generations born too late to remember when the sporting icon was the world’s most famous man, or too lazy to seek out one of the many books written about his boxing rise, his exile from the sport for refusing the draft, his improbable late-career comeback and his steely resilience in the face of a seismic Parkinson’s diagnosis. That this TV adaptation comes from Amazon is both a stroke of vertical integration and an indictment of a viewing public whose patience for source material wears thinner with every scroll.

The Prime Video drama says it’s based on “the life of Muhammad Ali”, a credible claim given the extent to which Ali’s cultural ubiquity made him a public figure of eminent domain. The first-ever “authorized scripted series” also has the backing of Ali’s widow, Lonnie, who serves as an executive producer. But the show clearly takes its direction from the definitive tome authored by Muhammad Ali’s brother, Rahaman Ali. The younger brother was a lifelong sparring partner, sharing a room in their childhood Kentucky home and remaining a prominent member of his entourage until the champ’s death in 2016, aged 74 – an occasion for global mourning.

This eight-part series, though, harks back to the epoch before he publicly declared himself a Black Muslim, when Muhammad Ali was a rising pugilist known as Cassius Clay Jr. It focuses tightly on the four-year period between Clay’s light-heavyweight gold at the 1960 Olympics in Rome and his heavyweight title victory over Sonny Liston at age 22, a world-stopping upset that brought household fame and infamy.

Showrunner Ben Watkins tries to have it both ways, with Clay as the star and younger brother Rudy as his equally compelling sidekick – the Watson to his Holmes. But in reaching for compromise, Watkins underscores how novel his series might have been, how much fresher the time-worn Ali story could have felt had it been told from the point of view of the lesser light in the great man’s shadow.

Without a shift in perspective to chew on in the hourlong episodes, viewers who already know the story or lived through it will be left obsessing over the accuracy of the show’s details and, more urgently, how closely the actors come to the true characters they’re portraying. Up-and-comer Kai Parham has some leeway to take emotional chances as Rudy, a character little known even to Ali’s biggest fans. Omari Hardwick, of Power fame, is a dead ringer for Cassius Clay Sr and brings a Ghost-like coolness to the father’s conflicted feelings over his namesake breaking through the social barriers that have kept the older man in check. Michael Ealy as Malcolm X is a casting choice no one will see coming from Think Like a Man or The Perfect Guy – but he handles the role with understated aplomb. But even that casting surprise pales in comparison to Hav Plenty’s Hill Harper as the honorable Elijah Muhammad.

Jaalen Best, however, is in the unenviable position of launching his career by showing he can shuffle, brag and look as pretty as the champ after Will Smith’s Oscar-worthy portrayal and Eli Goree’s estimable follow-up in One Night in Miami. Alas, Best doesn’t set himself apart. Watkins’s scripts and direction often leave him drowning in angst and self-doubt – as if the bombastic self-confidence and narcissism that came to define Ali were just an obvious mask for deeper insecurities. Self-delusion was his original superpower, after all, and self-actualization the second.

All the while, the fight choreography lacks real punch; the scenes in the ring aren’t half as jarring as the moments at home with Clay Jr and his mother, Odessa (The Hateful Eight’s Dana Gourrier), whose chemistry occasionally veers from standard mama’s boy territory towards the downright Freudian. The bouts don’t generate much suspense, either. Viewers coming to Muhammad Ali’s story fresh have the show’s title as a dead giveaway. The Greatest? A loser? Of course not. Not until he met Joe Frazier at the Garden in 1971, anyway.

That’s not to say The Greatest doesn’t win some rounds. The soundtrack’s needle drops, rather than its original score, betray Shawn Carter’s production influence – in a good way: the snippet of Donny Hathaway’s I Believe to My Soul morphing into Wu-Tang’s One of These Days. And Snowfall’s Amin Joseph absolutely steals the show as Liston – the deeply flawed belt holder who would have made a worthy protagonist for his own dramatic series.

And therein lies the problem with Hollywood’s boxing fix: when it isn’t reheating the classic underdog yarn, it’s recirculating the same old stories about Rocky, Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson – as if boxing hasn’t overflowed with some of the wildest testaments to the human spirit through the ages. The rise of Cassius Clay Jr may be the most hallowed of them all, but Rudy as Watson would have given it a timeless resonance. Rahaman, who died last year aged 82, receives a dedication in episode seven.

In the end, the Prime Video series should go down on the cards as a missed opportunity. The book, any book, would be time better spent.

The Greatest is available on Amazon Prime Video now