King Richard (2021)
Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green
King Richard is sugary crud, a primal flim-flam, an interview with a hideous man, but it features some decent tennis. It’s like any other film specifically designed to win Academy Awards, adhering to an algorithm of narrative touchstones before reaching its sincerity-with-a-motive conclusion. I was indifferent watching it in the moment and grew to hate everything about it during the bike ride to the café where I’m writing about it now.
Financed by Venus and Serena Williams, this piece of hagiography rarely goes beyond the superficial. There’s a sequence that involves the Williams family watching the Rodney King beating. Richard (Will Smith), the patriarch, watches on morosely as his wife Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis) chimes in that they’re grateful that it was recorded. This is then immediately followed –within the same scene – by a phone call about a future endorsement deal that the family has been pining for. No room to breath, no room for introspection; we shuffle along to the next scene that permits Will Smith to fart. That’s the most genuine thing about King Richard.
There are numerous asides and rejoinders throughout the film’s bloated runtime that add up to zilch. A confrontation and beating on the Compton tennis court leaves Richard to take matters into his own hands, literally packing his glock with the intention of murdering his harasser, only to see the guy mowed down by a rival gang. Richard would tell you it was planned, the sort of divine intervention that will lead his daughters to success. Or this dude was just about to murder someone, I dunno. There’s another sequence involving a neighbor that calls child services on the Williams, suggesting that the parents are abusing their children. There’s some truth to this, but the neighbor is effectively shut out, suggesting that the regiment that the sisters engage in is somehow acceptable given the yielded results. A film like say, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, is far more critical about the intrinsic push-and-pull dynamic of an abusive teacher and the subsequent sacrifices needed to transition from being great at something to being the very best – that sense of physical and mental endurance is precisely what’s missing here. Instead, in its place, we get a lot of saccharine gestures and phony posturing.
There are countless films like this yet I can’t name a single one because they immediately evaporate from your consciousness. This is that film: mildly enjoyable in the moment, instantly forgettable after a night’s sleep. It pretends to offer you something profound but instead functions as a commercial for Reebok and Wilson and Coca-Cola. Its mantra is to deviate from the norm, to assert your individuality, yet provides you with nothing thoughtful to remark upon other than its own thoughtlessness