Dire and unbelievable dross, albeit with some good tennis scenes.

Rating: 2/10 (30 October 2005)

About half-way through this facile film I turned to my wife and said "Is this the worst film that you have ever seen?" She agreed that it was certainly one of the worst. Actually, to be fair, it did improve towards the end when the mushy Mills and Boon "love story" gave way to some well-filmed tennis action. The Wimbledon matches, especially the final climax of the film, were rather well done and the quality of the tennis looked good to my (admittedly untutored) eye. But before that we were "treated" to a sham of a film with unconvincing characters unconvincingly played and with a story line as banal as it was preposterous.
Filming sport has always been problematic and there are few epics in the genre. Perhaps "Chariots of Fire" and "Rocky" and more recently "Seabiscuit", but there aren't many others. One of the problems is that the joy of sport is that the unexpected tends to happen and that to create an artificial unexpected in a fictional movie plot can pale when compared with the original. In "Wimbledon" a washed-out British tennis player gets inspiration from his encounter with a pretty young American. Quite why the makers of films like "Four Weddings and a Funeral"; "Notting Hill" and now "Wimbledon" have to have upper middle class Brits of a certain age getting laid by worldly-wise American gals I'm not sure. Anyway the tried and tested story-line gets rolled out again this time. Paul Bettany is a "Hugh Grant" figure par excellence (if they film Hugh's life story he could get the part, with a little hair dye) and his love interest Kirsten Dunst is sweet to look at. The speed with which she jumps into bed with Bettany might upset the Christian right, but it seems to help their tennis performances.
The film's dialogue is cringe-making in the extreme. How actors as good as Richard Lindsay, Eleanor Bron and Celia Imrie got their mouths around this dross is wondrous. And quite what John McEnroe and Chrissie Evert agreed to be in it I've no idea (they would be well advised not to give up the day job). Just another pay day I suppose. I cared little for the precious central characters with their ghastly families and their spoilt brat lives. Having said that I did enjoy the tennis scenes and the denouement I found exciting. But in truth it is a pointless film and you would be well advised to find something better to do than to spend an hour and a half of your time sitting in front of this guff. Buy a ticket for the real Wimbledon maybe?