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King Richard (2021)   
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Director:
Reinaldo Marcus Green |
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COUNTRY
USA |
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Genre
Biographical
drama/Sports |
NORWEGIAN
TITLE
King
Richard |
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RUNNING
TIME
144
minutes |
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Producer:
Tim White
Trevor White
Will Smith |
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Screenwriter:
Zach Baylin |
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Review
With a slight pose and quite a
bit of panache, Will Smith plays Richard Williams, father of tennis
greats Serena and Venus, in this biopic written by Zach Baylin and
directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (Monsters and Men, Joe Bell).
The unlikely success story of how Williams coached his daughters with
unorthodox methods before they turned pro and went on to win abundances
of Grand Slams is a fascinating one, even if King Richard feels
like it's overemphasising dad's achievements over the daughters'. This
is about his struggles and his demons, which is fair enough considering
the title and the angle, but it would have been interesting to peek more
inside the heads of the girls to find out at which point and how they
broke free and took control themselves. Because make no mistake about
it: The sports geniuses here are Serena and Venus, not King Richard. And
although we may be inclined to feel him when he's standing up to local
gangs or the segregation policies of his youth, this somehow feel like a
parenthesis to the success of the Williams sisters, despite Green's best
efforts of making it resounding. There's little doubt that the film is
out to do more than tell the story of the tennis sisters. It's also hell
bent on speaking out against injustice and right some wrongs. Which, of
course, is the same old story – except that in this particular case, it
ends up with the American Dream anyway. So you get the vapid aftertaste,
which you perhaps wouldn't have gotten if the film had concentrated more
on talent and sports than on retribution and ambition. Smith won the Academy
Award for Best Actor for his effort, even if his work here is a couple
of notches behind his best work, such as
I Am Legend.
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