Review: King Richard

The story of tennis sisters Venus and Serena Williams and their hard-working, hustling father Richard (Will Smith) as he tries to coach/mould them to success. Aunjanue Ellis plays their mother, whilst Jon Bernthal and Tony Goldwyn are rock-solid as the professional tennis coaches.

 

2021 propaganda piece masquerading as a biopic earning Will Smith an Oscar, which he basically soiled by his awful on-stage violence and inept, shamefully justifying acceptance speech. It’s an elephant. It’s still in the room. It will forever be in the room. It needed a mention, and I bet Richard Williams himself wasn’t impressed by the shadow it cast on his story. Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (“Joe Bell”) and scripted by Zach Baylin (“Gran Turismo”), there’s scarcely a believable moment and most bizarrely of all, the story is told from the least interesting and most culturally outdated point of view. Despite not personally being a fan of Venus and especially Serena Williams, this is their great story of female accomplishment and athletic dominance. Why the hell are we telling it from the point of view of their father? It just feels like such a wrong-headed decision to me, that the filmmakers somehow decided that this very obviously female-centric story needed a male gaze so to speak. Yes, Richard was instrumental in the development and success of his children but it was nonetheless their development and their success. Whatever one thinks of the Williams sisters as role models from a behaviour standpoint, they’re undeniably great female athletes, great African-American female athletes and an inspiration to others in those two categories. Talk about a missed opportunity.

 

The problems don’t end there. I don’t know what the Academy members were smoking that year but Will Smith gives an entirely unconvincing caricatured performance as Richard Williams. It actually felt like an insulting comic imitation to me. Smith isn’t a bad actor, but he is certainly a limited one. He was great on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and perfectly fine dramatically in the underrated “Seven Pounds”. Here as in “Ali” he’s all at sea playing a real-life figure. He seems to play Richard as though he were a simpleton, almost a gross Stepin Fetchit racial caricature from a long ago time. At one point he even literally delivers the line ‘My feets are fine’. Yes, ‘feets’. If that’s not Stepin Fetchit territory, I don’t know what is. In a serious biopic, Smith’s performance here is schtick-y, though the hair and makeup job on him at least is done subtly. It at least makes him look less like Smith if not more like Richard Williams. Having seen clips of the real Richard Williams I can kinda see why Smith plays him in this manner but he has wildly overpitched it to the point where it’s a barely recognisable characterisation. I can’t believe he was nominated for an Oscar let alone that he won it. Much better is Aunjanue Ellis as Oracene Williams, a far more grounded performance, far more believable.

 

Look, for the perspective the film is taking it’s not an inherently bad film, though obviously flawed due to Smith’s terrible performance. At times it is quite a sweet and likeable film, and elements of the story can’t help being entertaining. And I get that the film is showing a different side to African-American fatherhood to some extent, too. But the women are meant to be the heroes in this story. It’s bizarre to suggest otherwise, and the film is far less entertaining than it would’ve been had it been told from the right perspective of Venus and Serena. The film also offers up a largely sanitised version of the Williams family (aside from maybe Richard himself, to some extent), painting Venus and Serena as humble, shy little angels which is just bullshit even early in their careers. Are they really trying to sell us Richard Williams teaching his daughters about humility? ‘coz the two who became tennis stars certainly never learned. The film could’ve told its African-American patriarchy story with Richard Williams given supporting character status and it would’ve been a better film. The film could’ve told its African-American female athletic empowerment story whilst acknowledging Venus and Serena’s many, many flaws. Instead we get bullshit. A hustle about a hustler. What utter nonsense this film is, and while I’ve never remotely been an Aranxta Sanchez-Vicario fan (I was almost always cheering for her opponent), I don’t blame her for being upset at her demonic portrayal here for sheer drama’s sake. Totally unnecessary. I know she’s had her controversies over the years but it’s almost impossible to tell if someone’s piss break is legitimate or not. Capped off by a bizarre ending that only touches on the girls’ pro tennis successes through text crawl postscript. Yeah. ‘Coz it’s all about their dad and Big Willy Style.

 

Is Richard Williams a compelling character? To some extent yes, but it’s still a bizarre and wrongheaded decision to focus a story of female achievement and empowerment on the male parental figure instead of the champions. Children owe a great deal to their parents, but executive producers Venus and Serena Williams have given far too much credit to their father in their own story here. A phony lead performance also doesn’t help in this unconvincing, poorly told film. Revisionist bullshit.

 

Rating: C