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Big George Foreman
Fueled by an impoverished childhood, George Foreman channeled his anger into becoming an Olympic Gold medalist and World Heavyweight Champion, followed by a near-death experience that took h... Read all Fueled by an impoverished childhood, George Foreman channeled his anger into becoming an Olympic Gold medalist and World Heavyweight Champion, followed by a near-death experience that took him from the boxing ring to the pulpit. Fueled by an impoverished childhood, George Foreman channeled his anger into becoming an Olympic Gold medalist and World Heavyweight Champion, followed by a near-death experience that took him from the boxing ring to the pulpit.
- George Tillman Jr.
- Frank Baldwin
- Khris Davis
- Jasmine Mathews
- Sullivan Jones
- 81 User reviews
- 34 Critic reviews
- 45 Metascore
Top cast 99+
- George Foreman
- Muhammad Ali
- Archie Moore
- Rev. Virdell Stokes
- Nancy Foreman
- Doc Broadus
- Angelo Dundee
- Howard Cosell
- Mary Foreman
- Dick Sadler
- (as Dwayne Lamont Barnes)
- Roy Foreman
- Gloria Foreman
- (as K. Steele)
- Teenage George Jr.
- (as Austin D. Jones)
- Teenage Mary Foreman
- (as Jordan Yarborough)
- Sonny Foreman
- (as Philip Allin Fornah)
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
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- Trivia The director Geroge Tillman Jr didn't want to use a fat suit or visual effects in order to show the transformation Foreman went through from his prime to when he came out of retirement to return to boxing in his forties. The filming was split into two blocks; first to shoot scenes where Foreman is at his prime and later for when he's in his forties. The crew took six weeks off so Khris Davis could bulk up for the latter part of the filming. Davis had pretty strict instructions on how many calories to eat per day, depending on his training regime, but the actor went above and beyond, consuming 7000 calories a day to gain the necessary weight. He went from 225 to 275 in six weeks eventually ending up at around 282.
- Goofs Pleasanton, California, where the Job Corps camp is located, is in a valley, nearly surrounded by hills and mountains. There are none to be seen in the film.
George Foreman : Anger was my answer to everything. I couldn't stop myself from fighting. It was the only thing I did well.
- Connections Featured in OWV Updates: Multimedia Update (08/10/2023) - OWV is Back! (2023)
- Soundtracks Life Written by Nichols Phelps and Brent Lindsay Performed by Brock Hudson Courtesy of Glow Music Group
User reviews 81
Uplifting movie.
- dombernetti
- Apr 28, 2023
- How long is Big George Foreman? Powered by Alexa
- April 28, 2023 (United States)
- United States
- Official site
- El gran George Foreman
- New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
- Affirm Films
- Mandalay Pictures
- Sony Pictures Releasing
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
- $32,000,000 (estimated)
- Apr 30, 2023
- Runtime 2 hours 9 minutes
- Dolby Digital
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‘Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World’ Review: It’s Conventional but Delivers
George Tillman's Jr.'s prosaic but urgent biopic is a boxing film that turns into a faith-based parable.
By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
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Popular on variety.
To say that there’s a link between boxing and rage is to state a blunt reality. It’s no accident that the greatest boxing movie ever made is called “Raging Bull.” Yet not every champion boxer is a raging bull. The Foreman we see is one, and Khris Davis , the dynamic actor who plays him with a chiseled stare of cold fury, makes you see that the young and aimless George, who joins the paramilitary Job Corps in the mid-’60s, already views himself the way the young Malcolm X did, as a Black man who’s “angry” only in response to the wrongs that have been done to him. They have a way of adding up. In the Job Corps barracks in Pleasanton, Ca., when George spies the recruit who stole the Converse sneakers his mother sent him, he’s ready to pummel him into oblivion. And we see why; it’s an insult added to a thousand injuries.
Foreman just about gets himself kicked out of the Corps, but he’s rescued by Doc Broadus (Forest Whitaker, intensely winning, speaking in a voice of the purest lived-in gravel), an officer who runs a boxers’ training camp on the premises. George takes to the ring as if born to it — not just the punching but the discipline of it all, the jump-roping and the repetitions. The year is 1967, and Doc tells him that he should aim to try for the American Olympic boxing team in five years. Upon hearing that, George, with his feral scowl, looks like he wants to beat up Doc. The film cuts to one year later, when he has gotten himself into the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, with just a year of training.
That, of course, was the Olympics that yielded the iconic moment when the Black American track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos, during their medal ceremony, stood with their black-gloved fists raised. When George, by contrast, wins by a TKO over the Soviet boxer Iones Chepulis to take the gold medal, he’s handed a small American flag, which he waves around in the ring. When he gets back to the States, that’s all the folks in his Houston neighborhood are talking about — that George sold out, embracing America when he should have adopted a more revolutionary stance. Talk about a motive for anger! But George doesn’t let it throw him. He channels that rage into the ring, scaling the mountain toward the heavyweight championship by destroying one fighter after the next, until he gets his title bout, facing off against Joe Frazier (Carlos Takam).
For a while, George Foreman was on top of the world (until Ali defeated him), but you could say that the real drama of “Big George Foreman” begins after that. George, in addition to being an angry fighter, is a sinner in his personal life. He meets and marries the sexy and supportive Paula (Shein Mompremier), only to take her for granted and fool around behind her back. And he pays the price. His domestic life collapses; his boxing life fades; he has a near-death experience after Jimmy Young pummels him. George’s mother, Nancy (Sonja Sohn), a conservative Christian lady who has never liked boxing, has been telling him through the entire movie to honor a higher power. And now, with death looking him in the face, he does. He bounces back and embraces Jesus. He gets himself baptized and becomes an ordained minister.
The George we’ve known isn’t such a talker, but the gift of gab — his transformation into the smiling, big-daddy George Foreman we now know — will come upon him. It’s a shift in his spirit. The letting go of the rage.
This is not the stuff of a boxing movie. It’s a conversion narrative, the story of an addict’s redemption. And watching it, it has a bit of that slightly bland I’ve-seen-the-light piety that makes me less than ecstatic about so many faith-based movies. (It’s not that I don’t like faith; I just don’t like seeing faith turned into Hallmark propaganda.) But “Big George Foreman” has a last act, provided by history, that’s something of a killer. George, having been knocked down by life, gets even more knocked down by his finances. He entrusted them to Des (John Magaro), his flaky alcoholic bunkmate from the Job Corps, and the result is that after setting up a Youth Center in Houston, marrying the devout Mary Joan (Jasmine Matthews) and settling comfortably into his retirement, he discovers that he’s broke.
There’s only thing left for him to do — and no, I’m not talking about the George Foreman Grill (though that does merit a mention). George will go back into the ring. When he’s 38. After having been away from boxing for 10 years. Now looking (as the movie jokes) less like Superman than the Michelin Man. (He’s 315 pounds and needs to get down to 265.) He’s well past the point when any boxer who is sane has ever gotten back into the ring. But he will do something extraordinary. He will win. Again and again.
Because he’s feeling the old rage? No. Because he’s connecting with the boxing force that grew out of the rage and is attaching itself to a higher impulse: the desire to save (himself). He might still be a raging bull, but he’s now a transcendent bull. And this, of course, all really happened. George Foreman, in one of the most singular stories in the history of sports, became, at 45, the oldest man ever to win the heavyweight championship. “Big George Foreman” takes you just far enough inside that journey, that coup, to become a sports biopic of appealing urgency. The film has a conventional heart, yet it’s about a victory we share as if it were our own.
Reviewed at Sony Screening Room, April 26, 2023. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 129 MIN.
- Production: A Sony Pictures Releasing release of a Mandalay Pictures, Affirm Films, State Street Pictures production. Producer: David Zelon. Executive producers: George Foreman, Peter Guber, Wendy S. Williams, Henry Holmes.
- Crew: Director: George Tillman Jr. Screenplay: Frank Baldwin, George Tillman Jr. Camera: John Matysiak, David Tattersall. Editors: Alex Blatt, Craig Hayes. Music: Marcelo Zarvos.
- With: Khris Davis, Jasmine Matthews, Sullivan Jones, Lawrence Gilliard Jr., John Magaro, Sonja Sohn, Forest Whitaker.
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