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

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 .

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