SCREEN

WIMBLEDON

Josh Bell













WIMBLEDON (PG-13)

(2.5 stars)


Stars: Paul Bettany, Kirsten Dunst, Sam Neill


Director: Richard Loncraine


Details: Opens Friday



You've seen this movie before. Imagine a sports movie about an over-the-hill underdog making a spectacular comeback, and one of British production company Working Title's wry romantic comedies (Notting Hill, About a Boy, Bridget Jones's Diary, etc.) mashed together and you've got a pretty good idea of what Wimbledon is like. It's got all the sports movie clichés (the underdog facing the arrogant opponent, the pep talks, the drawn-out final game in which everyone knows the outcome) and all the rom-com clichés (the meet-cute, the swift falling in love, the pointless obstacles, the final reconciliation), and it plays them all well enough to please undemanding fans of either genre.


Paul Bettany is tennis player Peter Colt, who was once ranked 11th in the world but has now slid to 119th place, and is entering his final Wimbledon as a wild card. He expects to bow out early with a loss, but gets an unexpected boost from rising phenom Lizzie Bradbury (Kirsten Dunst), with whom he starts a heated affair. Lizzie is a good decade his junior and watched closely by her father-coach (Sam Neill, smarming it up), but she and Peter share an immediate connection during the madness of the tournament.


As Peter rides an improbable winning streak, he and Lizzie fall in love, even as her father sees the relationship as a distraction from his daughter's game. It's not hard to predict how things will end for Peter and Lizzie, both as a couple and as tennis players, but the road there is not as charming as it could be. Bettany and Dunst have decent but not exceptional chemistry, the humor is lackluster, and the supporting cast barely fleshed out. Director Richard Loncraine fares much better with the tennis scenes, which he stages with a dynamism that easily avoids the rote back-and-forth of most TV coverage. Thanks to the use of CGI, the camera follows the ball from the racket to the ground and back, and the actors grunt and lunge like the real thing. It helps that Dunst and Bettany look like actual athletes, too.


They both give fine performances, although the film really belongs to Bettany's Peter, as his effort to recapture his glory, exemplified by both his romance and his tennis playing, takes center stage. There are moments when Peter's struggle is compelling; mostly, however, it gets buried under a mountain of clichés.

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