‘King Richard': Will Smith Serves Up an Ace in Conventional Sports Biopic [Review]

To be clear, just because I believe that '“King Richard” can win Best Picture doesn’t mean that it’s a deserved winner. Regardless, Marcus Reinald Green’s film is a wonderfully entertaining rags-to-riches sports biopic. It uses its 144 minute runtime to build up its characters and, by the end of it, you actually care about the fate of the characters. It’s not necessarily a work of art as much as a pleasurably well-made movie-movie.

Will Smith carries the film as Richard Williams, an undeterred father of five daughters, who raises his two most athletic children into playing the game of Tennis. Of course, we all know how this is going to end; Venus and Serena Williams would turn out to be two of the greatest female tennis players of all-time. What the film seems to be suggesting is that the brains behind the operation was always Richard. The Williams patriarch was driven by a clear vision of his daughter’s future, using a meticulous blueprint he created called “the plan.”

The Wiliams family lived in Compton, California and Green sets up his movie by showing just how rough and tough the neighbourhood was. Along with the occasional drive-by-shooting that would happen next door, Richard would sometimes get beaten up by gangs just to protect his daughters from hanging with the wrong crowd outside the tennis court. Of course, such a sympathetic portrait of Richard isn’t the full story. In “King Richard” we see some of this man’s flaws, but not enough. His temper isn’t as fiery as it was in real life. Ditto the abusive parenting. Any hints of his infidelity to wife Brandi (Aunjanue Ellis) is relegated to a single sentence subtly mentioning it in the screenplay.

Regardless, even if you don’t hear or see much about his past, Richard’s story is worth telling and Smith embodies the role with such authentic fervor. This is intensely disciplined acting from Smith, maybe not career best work (check out his “Ali” for that), but close to it. The 53-year-old actor has always proven that he’s a commendable actor, but not without choosing the wrong project time and time again. That changes with “King Richard.”

Smith’s Richard is a man humiliated by his past mistakes and not wanting that same fate to be thrown into his children’s hands. In one gruellingly emotional scene, Williams tells Venus about his own humiliations as a Black man growing up in the South and the physical violence he had to endure in the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.

When you have a film tackling the power of family, perseverance and unwavering belief as a means to achieve the impossible, then you will run into cliches and “King Richard,” for all its merits, is conventionally told. It’s a film that takes a familiar movie blueprint and runs with it. Zach Baylin’s script wouldn’t necessarily work without Green’s docu-realist direction, nor would it go anywhere without the immaculate performances. There’s Smith, but another standout is Jon Bernthal as Venus’ shrewd coach; bringing humor in his exasperatingly relentless arguments he gets into with Williams. Aunjanue Ellis has a few stunning scenes as well as Richard’s wife, Brandi.

Despite being overlong, with a tad too many obvious narrative choices, the film works best when its sole focus is Smith’s Richard. Contrary to some of his negative traits being hidden from the audience by the filmmakers, Williams’ fight against the white tennis establishment actually did happen and it’s a remarkable story that needed to be told. [B]