Battle of the Sexes Review

The movie Battle of the Sexes tells the story of the classic tennis match in 1973 between female tennis challenger Billie Jean King and retired male tennis champion Bobby Riggs, who believed that even though he had been out of the game for a few years, he would still be able to defeat a woman.

The film stars actress Emma Stone as King, while Riggs is portrayed by Steve Carell, both of whom are very well-known from their other works. However, the thing that struck me as odd before even watching the movie was that the film only had a budget of $25 million, a pretty small amount by 

Hollywood standards. Compared to the budgets of the other films that Stone and Carell have been a part of, ranging from around $60 million all the way up to $175 million when adjusted for inflation, it made me wonder what they were doing in a fairly low budget movie like this one, which I will come back to later on.

The basic plot of the movie is that Billie Jean King is winning a number of championships and other accolades in the field of women’s tennis, easily handling most of the competition in the process. This gets the rest of the sports world, which previously didn’t really care about women’s athletics, to take notice. However, Bobby Riggs does not buy into the hype and feels that men’s sports are far superior to women’s and to prove it, he challenges King to a “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match.

As far as the acting goes, both starring actors knocked it out of the park with their portrayals. For Emma Stone’s portrayal of Billie Jean King, it would have been incredibly easy, especially in this day and age, to make her into a one-dimensional feminist character who just wanted to show off that she could beat the men, however luckily that’s not what they go with since that’s not what the match was about. At first, King really doesn’t care about the gender issue, she has the approach that she’s an athlete like everybody else and just happens to be a woman. It’s not until Riggs attempts to mock and belittle her accomplishments because she is a woman, coupled with the fact that the winners of the women’s championships make much less than the men’s championships, pushes her to take on the challenge of the Battle of the Sexes.

On to Carell’s role as Bobby Riggs, he also stays true to what Riggs’ character of arrogant and chauvinistic, however not to the point where it just goes over the top and is just annoying to watch. It is always a fine line to walk when you have a character whose intentionally disrespectful and mean spirited, but in this case it stays enough that you understand Riggs’ intentions behind all of his stunts and claims, however it doesn’t get so bad to the point that you just want to turn off the movie such as is the case with many other films.

Since Battle of the Sexes is based on a true story, I also want to take a look at how faithful the movie was to the original events of the match, and how many creative liberties were thrown in. Normally I’m okay with adding some new scenes into a movie that didn’t actually happen or were heavily exaggerated from the event that the movie is based on, as long as it isn’t a major detail that was changed just to make it an easier story to tell or something so ridiculous that it’s a distraction from the overall enjoyment of the rest of the film. After all, since it is a movie and not an exact copy of the thing that it is based on, then for me it’s fine if the movie isn’t 100 percent accurate to the source material as long as it’s handled tactfully. Is that the case here? Well, that’s an interesting question to answer, as I feel that they did a pretty good job of getting all of the major details surrounding the events down, however, there were some of the minor events that happened were a little bit off. For example, in one of the scenes there was one character that was having a conversation with another one early on in the movie, although in reality they didn’t know them until later on, as well as some of the officials in the final game of the match being in different spots than they were supposed to, however these were all minor distractions and the overall value wasn’t harmed that much.

In conclusion, I would certainly say that Battle of the Sexes was a good film, and on a rating of 5 I would give it a four and a half out of five, since there were some parts that were inaccurate for not really any storytelling reason, but otherwise the acting, story and the overall experience was very good.