Post by Dracula on Nov 21, 2021 14:47:59 GMT -5
King Richard(11/19/2021)
Venus and Serena Williams are exactly the kind of dominant athletes with unique stories that would one day inspire a biopic and give the producers credit they found a someone original direction to come at that with by opting to make their father the vector for that biopic, at least at this juncture when the sisters aren’t retired yet. The film follows Richard Williams (Will Smith) as he executes his wild multi-page plan to train his daughters from birth to be tennis stars and succeeds at getting them from Compton to the Grand Slams by following it. One can tell that the Williams family had their hand in this as the movie’s raison d'être is to celebrate this guy and prove that he was right about pretty much everything at every turn to the point where it takes something of a repetitive formula where people question his judgement only to be shown to be fools a couple scenes later. That said the movie isn’t delusional about why some of these people might have questioned him in the first place, to people who don’t have the benefit of hindsight a lot of what he’s doing sure seems like the worst kind of “stage-father” behavior and the film does sometimes admit there were moments of friction between him and his wife. You can certainly see the places where a more critical or at least questioning movie could have been made about this guy but they take the hagiography approach instead. And that’s not a completely terrible choice; maybe he really just is that great. The movie itself is certainly professionally made if a bit longer than it needed to be. The supporting cast is strong and there are some witty audience pleasing moments, but I must say I wasn’t terribly impressed with Will Smith here; the southern accent he adopts feels strained and his character is so endlessly confident that he lacks a certain emotional range and becomes kind of unrelatable. At the end of the day, this is a mainstream “inspirational” sports biopic and there’s always an audience for those but it’s rarely going to be my cup of tea. I didn’t mind watching the movie, it passed the time and gave me some insight to this story, but I’m just never going to be all that enthusiastic.
*** out of Five
Venus and Serena Williams are exactly the kind of dominant athletes with unique stories that would one day inspire a biopic and give the producers credit they found a someone original direction to come at that with by opting to make their father the vector for that biopic, at least at this juncture when the sisters aren’t retired yet. The film follows Richard Williams (Will Smith) as he executes his wild multi-page plan to train his daughters from birth to be tennis stars and succeeds at getting them from Compton to the Grand Slams by following it. One can tell that the Williams family had their hand in this as the movie’s raison d'être is to celebrate this guy and prove that he was right about pretty much everything at every turn to the point where it takes something of a repetitive formula where people question his judgement only to be shown to be fools a couple scenes later. That said the movie isn’t delusional about why some of these people might have questioned him in the first place, to people who don’t have the benefit of hindsight a lot of what he’s doing sure seems like the worst kind of “stage-father” behavior and the film does sometimes admit there were moments of friction between him and his wife. You can certainly see the places where a more critical or at least questioning movie could have been made about this guy but they take the hagiography approach instead. And that’s not a completely terrible choice; maybe he really just is that great. The movie itself is certainly professionally made if a bit longer than it needed to be. The supporting cast is strong and there are some witty audience pleasing moments, but I must say I wasn’t terribly impressed with Will Smith here; the southern accent he adopts feels strained and his character is so endlessly confident that he lacks a certain emotional range and becomes kind of unrelatable. At the end of the day, this is a mainstream “inspirational” sports biopic and there’s always an audience for those but it’s rarely going to be my cup of tea. I didn’t mind watching the movie, it passed the time and gave me some insight to this story, but I’m just never going to be all that enthusiastic.
*** out of Five
