Serving up a slick, sanitised version of the Williams sisters’ story
King Richard 12A cert, 138 min
★★★★★
Dir Reinaldo Marcus Green Starring Will Smith, Aunjanue Ellis, Saniyya Sidney, Demi Singleton, Jon Bernthal, Tony Goldwyn
What has Will Smith been up to for the past 10 years? His CV has all the hallmarks of mid-career busyness: 10 lead roles in major studio productions and an animated voice gig, as well as a sprinkling of hey-it’s-me cameos. But how many of them could you name?
Here, at long last, is a film for Smith that feels as perfectly tailored to his particular movie-star skill set as Ali or The Pursuit of Happyness – or indeed Independence Day or Men in Black. In this slickly made, enjoyably rousing sports drama, he plays Richard Williams, the father and sometime coach of Venus and Serena Williams, who shunted his gifted daughters from the Los Angeles ghetto on to the course to global tennis stardom through sheer paternal bloodymindedness.
Reinaldo Marcus Green’s film follows the Williams family from Compton, Los Angeles, in the mid1980s to the Florida tennis academy where the sisters trained under Rick Macci (a hilarious Jon Bernthal), until the beginnings of Venus’s professional career in 1994. Richard variously natters, blusters, squabbles and cajoles his way through almost every scene, and is a pain in the neck in at least half of them. But Smith’s pinpoint timing and loveable mangy-bear charisma turns his irksomeness into a comic and dramatic asset.
The film is lots of fun until you notice it doesn’t quite add up. Even if you weren’t aware King Richard had been made in close consultation with the Williams family (Venus and Serena serve as executive producers), its portrait of a buccaneering power dad is glaringly incomplete.
During an argument scene when his wife Brandi (a terrific Aunjanue Ellis) mentions his previous marriages, illegitimate children and multiple failed business ventures, it feels like a sort of drive-by confession on the part of Zach Baylin’s screenplay: a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it acknowledgement of various biographical misdeeds that have been otherwise smoothed over so as not to jeopardise the plot’s loveableunderdog drive.
Yet while King Richard expects you to play along with its fudges and elisions, its story still feels as momentous as the Williams sisters’ own achievements – which, in a genre that naturally tacks towards cliché, is no mean feat. And as the young Venus and Serena, Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton give two bright, untutored, consistently alive-to-the-moment performances that also go a long way towards selling the film as a treasurable one-off.
A word of praise, too, for Sharen Davis’s costumes, which serve as a kind of deadpan showcase for the era’s extraordinary sportswear colour schemes. It’s all part of the King Richard package: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll see a lot of turquoise.
In cinemas now