When Billie Beat Bobby

Amen, sister! Can I get a witness? Hallelujah, I'm saved! Yes, he orthodox gospel of feminist rectitude is proclaimed at full volume in this trying-to-be-relevant-but-mostly-fluffy made-for-TV movie.

My daughter has recently taken up an interest in tennis, so I dropped this lightweight drama in my Netflix queue, not expecting much either way. As it turned out, this could have been a really bad movie, but thankfully it's not. What saves it (hallelujah, it's saved!) from being just another dreary feminist harangue is good performances from Holly Hunter as Wimbledon champion Billie Jean King and Ron Silver as the aging hustler Bobby Riggs. I was going to further criticize this movie for unequal treatment: making King an actual human being but portraying Riggs as a nothing but a one-dimensional buffoon (after all, who doesn't want a dastardly villain who is easily dispatched?), but the more I read about Riggs, the more I came to realize that that was the way he was in real life.

This is not a fine-cuisine-and-red-wine type of movie; it's more like a Burger King meal deal. Fun, but not to be taken too seriously, and not with all the heavy-handed preaching.