The Movie: Despite the fact that Will Smith and Jon Voight both put up Oscar nominated performances, the fact of the matter is Ali just isn't a very good movie. There just doesn't seem to be a strong sense of a common thread running through all of the scenes to make it flow together. It's all disjointed, like a random jumble of characters and images drawn from Muhammad Ali's life and the civil rights movements of the 60's, with very little sense of order.

The supporting roles seemed more like caricatures of people than any real, breathing person that I would really care about, and as a result, this movie really starts to drag about half way through it. The fight scenes on the other hand were innovative and quite well done, and Jon Voight is pretty darned convincing as Howard Cossell... but these things just aren't enough to carry the whole movie, and I actually found myself checking the clock to see how much longer I was gonna have to endure it.

The DVD: The quality of the film transfer on this disc is just about the best I've seen yet on a non-special edition type disc. The clean, bright picture is free from compression artifacts, and hits you with some vivid colors and images. The audio, on the other hand, was just average, with some passages of dialog lacking a bit in clarity.

As I mentioned, this is not a special edition style release, so the only extras you get are trailers for Ali, Spiderman and Men in Black II, all with very nice looking anamorphic widescreen trailers with 5.1 audio, so while this may not be a balls-out special edition release, it was still put together with a lot of attention to detail.