On October 26 1970, Muhammad Ali made his long-awaited comeback in Atlanta after a contentious three-year suspension over his refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam war. His victory was a professional landmark, a political statement — and only the second biggest story in the city that night.
Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist tells the tale of an Ali victory after-party that became the site of an audacious robbery of the country’s most powerful Black crime lords. Based on an eponymous 2020 podcast, the eight-part series is part-true crime saga, part-stylised throwback to 1970s Blaxploitation films complete with split-screens and funky basslines. A B-movie pastiche with an A-list ensemble — Samuel L Jackson, Don Cheadle and Taraji P Henson — the show blends a cool aesthetic and irreverent tone with a wider exploration of ambition and the realities of being Black in a post-segregation southern city.
At the centre of the story is the “Chicken Man” (real name Gordon Williams); a small-time bookie with outsized ambitions of building his own “Black Vegas”. Chicken Man is played by comedian Kevin Hart, who proves himself more than capable of holding his own among the heavyweights in both scenes of caperish levity and thrillerish grit.
Farce and violence collide when the post-fight shindig hosted by Chicken to butter up New York boss Frank Moten (a scenery-devouring Jackson) ends up with the so-called “Black Godfather” being ambushed by armed thieves. And when suspicions spread that the bookie had orchestrated the stitch-up, Chicken knows that he’s well and truly cooked unless he can deliver the real mastermind to Moten.
To do so, Chicken finds himself improbably teaming up with the cop working on the case. He is detective JD Hudson (Cheadle, brilliantly understated). As Atlanta’s most senior African American officer, Hudson is both disrespected by racist colleagues and disparaged by other Black people — including Muhammad Ali (Dexter Darden), to whom he’s assigned while the boxer’s in town.
The heist plays out across two clammy episodes and is grippingly realised. But Fight Night is at its most compelling when it goes beyond the titular event to explore the conflicts that arise both within the community and individual characters. Where Black lives are sometimes portrayed as homogenous, here there is a breadth and depth, complexity and contradiction in the cop who interrogates his own identity and the gangster who speaks eloquently of empowerment; in the man they call “The Greatest” and the one known as Chicken.
★★★★☆
On ITVX in the UK and on Peacock in the US
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