King Richard 4K 2021 Ultra HD 2160p

Based on the true story of Richard Williams (Will Smith), the father of tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams, who overcame enormous obstacles to make his daughters successful. In Compton, where they lived, there was no place to train future champions, but Richard had a plan because he wanted a better future for his daughters, even though he himself had never played tennis.

King Richard 4K Review
Richard Williams (Will Smith) lives in Compton, California with wife Brandi (Aunjanue Ellis) and five daughters, whom he does his best to keep from the horrors of the ghetto: makes them get straight A's and plays tennis with them every day - the latter is especially good comes out in two younger children, Serena (Demi Singleton) and Venus (Saniya Cindy). The family does not have money to study at a sports school and expensive courts, so Richard goes to all the famous coaches and convinces them to take the girls for free - because someday they will definitely become champions. Around everyone considers his father obsessed and perhaps a little crazy, but he is sure that he is right - because he has a plan, and he sticks to it.

The biography of Richard Williams would make a good psychological thriller: just imagine, a person in advance, before the birth of children, planned the whole future for them, decided what they would do and controlled their lives at every step. Sounds creepy. It sounds like a tragedy for a person who himself grew up in a disadvantaged area, was deprived of the opportunity to realize himself in sports, and now compensates for his own failures by broadcasting dreams and aspirations through his daughters. In any sport, there are always such parents: they scream the loudest in the stands, try to teach coaches (Richard does this more than once), and they rejoice at any success of the children, as if they belong to them personally. In that sense, "King Richard" is a surprisingly accurate portrait of an obsessed father, one of millions like him (minus the Ku Klux Klan and ghetto stories), except that he was lucky to have really talented daughters.

Will Smith seems to play such a character: a man hunched under the weight of past defeats, whose fatherly love borders on an unhealthy manic obsession. He really scares those moments when he deprives his daughters of the little joys of life because of his personal strange attitudes or makes them revisit Cinderella so that they finally understand its true meaning - that "one must always be modest" (a quality that the most cinematic Richard is not very typical). And when other characters accuse him of self-centeredness, they only want to nod approvingly.

That's just the authors themselves, it seems, do not think so: they deduce Richard as a uniquely positive character. Any wild idea he has - like finding a free coach or refusing to play in junior championships - turns out to be correct in the end. All the tough "life lessons" he teaches his daughters are presented as sensei's wisdom. The obsession with control becomes the path to success - after all, Venus and Serena really became champions, which means he did everything right. In those rare moments when Richard stumbles and does something wrong, he is immediately corrected by his wife - whose role in the film, in principle, is limited to rare soulful monologues that return her husband to the true path (it seems that Oscars are usually won for such roles) for the background).

And the problem is not in some moral side of the issue: they say, the film positively depicts a person whom someone may not perceive positively. The point is the discrepancy between intonation and material - "King Richard" shows one thing, but with all the dramatic and directing tools it encourages you to think something completely different. One gets the feeling that Will Smith just turned out to be too good an actor for this movie - and found in his hero that dark side that the film itself almost ignores. We clearly see his vulnerability, insecurity, destructive egocentrism, obsessive desire to do everything according to a personal plan, without listening to anyone around. And we wait until it finally comes out sideways to him - but it does not. After all, "King Richard" is not a thriller, but a success story in spite of the whole world, so sweet and one-sided that it was as if Richard Williams himself shot it. A film that seems to want to be "Coach Carter" - but it turns out almost "Temporary difficulties."

Moreover, as a spirit-uplifting sports drama, the film also works strangely. There is no story of overcoming, emotional rollercoaster, where the rise of the hero to the top is impossible without a terrible fall. It seems that we should rejoice: finally, at least someone got rid of the jammed genre clichés. But the effect is rather the opposite - after "King Richard" you understand that the cliches were invented for a reason. Remove them, and you get a story about people who were told from the very beginning that they would succeed - and then they really did. In the film, there is not a single large active conflict at all, only a passive confrontation between the hero and the world that does not understand, from which he always, without much effort, emerges victorious.

And even the social drama around the heroes does not specifically concern them. We're being shown murders in the ghetto, we're on TV about police violence, Richard Williams is telling stories about the Ku Klux Klan and the rich whites who beat him up when he was a kid. All this well paints the context in which Serena and Venus grew up - and, in general, makes it clear why their father turned out that way. And yet, it doesn’t bother them in any way - yes, it’s poor, yes, it’s sad, but in the end they will still get into all the prestigious tennis clubs without any problems, and on the way to success they will meet exactly one racist: one of the coaches will say that girls are better off "trying their hand at basketball". That is, the context, as it were, exists in parallel with the film and is needed mainly to raise the stakes - they say, this is not just a story of two girls, but a plot about a breakthrough of an entire social class in a sport where only whites used to play. But just to convey this, “King Richard” for some reason has to explain the meanings in words and throw tortured dialogues at the viewer that intelligibly decipher the entire movie. The film generally talks a lot and does little, here all the important plot twists and turns and changes within the characters occur exclusively in words - we hardly see them in action. The film prefers the pathos of a shabby manifesto to the language of cinema. Well, we are waiting for the Oscars.