Goofs for
Ali (2001) More at IMDbPro »

• Anachronisms: When Ali starts to run in the streets of Kinshasa, we see a kid with a modern-style microscooter.
  
  
• Continuity: When Cassius Clay is introduced to Nation of Islam founder, Elijah Mohammed, to be given the new name - Mohammed Ali - the Revox tape recorder on the table disappears between shots.
  
  
• Anachronisms: Some of the Nikon cameras used by the press are modern, not 1970s, models.
  
  

• Continuity: Ali sits down twice when Malcolm visits him in his hotel room.
  
  
• Anachronisms: When Ali and Liston are getting weighed, one of the people takes a photo using a Canon EOS, a camera not made in the '70s
  
  
• Anachronisms: When Ali is jogging in the very first scene, there's an '87 Taurus in the background, and a '90s vintage car in the carport.
  
  
• Anachronisms: In scenes from the 1960s, Howard Cosell is depicted wearing a hairpiece. Cosell didn't start wearing a hairpiece until the early '70s, prior to which he slicked back his receding hairline.
  
  
• Factual errors: Chauncey Eskridge was not at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis standing directly under Martin Luther King Jr. at the moment of King's April 4, 1968 assassination (the director knew this).
  
  
• Anachronisms: In the fight with Sonny Liston, the ring had three ropes not four as depicted in the film. Boxing rings didn't have four ropes until the mid-1970s.
  
  
• Continuity: When the FBI is setting up the wiretaps, the cigarette and ashes jump around in the ashtray between shots.
  
  
• Anachronisms: Ali exchanges winks with a ring card girl in the George Foreman fight. According to boxing historian Bert Sugar, ring cards girls were not in existence until the late 1970s at Caesar's Palace.
  
  
• Anachronisms: There's a scene where Ali is standing on a city street with a Sears department store in the background. The logo is current as opposed to that used in the '60s and '70s.
  
  
• Factual errors: In the last fight of the film, Ali always sits down between each round. In reality, he never sat down in this fight.
  
  
• Continuity: In the scene where Ali, Bingham, and Belinda are watch the Frazier-Ellis fight, the fight is in black and white in one shot and color in a later shot when Frazier wins.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: In the early '60s section of the film Clay refers to a member of the Beatles ('John Lennon' we presume) as "the one with the glasses". Lennon seldom wore his glasses in public (though there are a few studio photos), and was certainly not famous for them, until 1967. It is possible however that Lennon would have been wearing his thick-rimmed black glasses when the Beatles met Clay during their first visit to the U.S. in February 1964, then removed them for the publicity shots taken during that visit.
  
  
• Factual errors: The argument Ali and his wife Sonji have over Ali's seeing Veronica Porche did not happen before the Ali/Foreman fight, but instead happened before the 3rd Ali/Frazier fight, "The Thrilla in in Manila", in 1975.
  
  
• Factual errors: The officer at the induction center wears the belt of an Army officer (black), indicating that he is an Army captain, yet he wears his rank like a Naval or Coast Guard lieutenant (with the bars' center line bisecting the collar angle, and lacking branch insignia on his left collar).
  
  

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