KING RICHARD (12A)
★★★✩✩
“I wrote me a 78-page plan for their careers before they were born,” says a grey-flecked Will Smith at the beginning of this Oscar-tipped biopic.
Smith is playing Richard Williams, father and self-taught trainer of tennis stars Venus and Serena.
The film focuses on this very unusual man, not the daughters he raised to be future Wimbledon champions on rundown courts in the impoverished Los Angeles neighbourhood of Compton.
Despite its Shakespearean title, this isn’t a meaty drama about a complicated patriarch but a rousing underdog sports movie.
Made in close consultation with the family (Venus and Serena are credited as executive producers), the film presents Richard as an inspirational figure. His plan may sound unusual but it’s necessary if the good-humoured security guard wants to drag his family out of the ghetto and overcome racism on the tennis circuit.
Beatings from local thugs hanging around the public courts and knockbacks from professional trainers never dent his resolve.
The film charts this success story as Richard lands his curiously uncomplaining daughters (played by Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton) a place in the Florida tennis academy run by Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal) and enters Venus into her first professional tournament at age 14.
Smith’s charismatic turn is compelling. But the film doesn’t know what to do with more troubling aspects of Richard’s personality.
In a rare scene of marital strife, his wife Brandi (Aunjanue Ellis) brings up his previous marriage, the children he abandoned and his failed business ventures. It’s a glimpse of a more interesting story that this authorised biopic is unable to tell.