In addition, the reluctant, and possibly overmatched, knight is a tricky figure. For American audiences it takes a certain kind of masculine confidence to counterbalance it (like Bogart's in Casablanca and To Have and Have Not, for instance, or Bruce Willis's more recently). American audiences will go for a cocky-juvenile romance hero who has to learn a thing or two before he can win big time; they crowned Tom Cruise in this guise. Bettany is a more nuanced figure, more scaled to life--qualities cast away in such a conventional romance--but in any case he's so self-effacing it's hard to believe he's ranked even 119th. (This I take to be a British fantasy on the part of the moviemakers--they have the raw talent to lead the world in the place of the Americans, they're just too genteel.)

As a result, Wimbledon isn't enough of a dead-ahead romance to please a popular audience here, and not enough of a realistic depiction of what it's like to be an older player in a tough game to please a more discerning crowd. If the makers wanted it to be "thoughtful" then it shouldn't be a competitive romance but more like Ron Shelton's Kevin Costner sports movies, Bull Durham and Tin Cup, in which the hero competes mainly against himself. Instead, the romance rivalry descends like doom on the plot. As soon as you see the young American champ, who's slept with Dunst and whose serves travel in excess of 140 mph, you know that Bettany will have to play him in the final match and you know Bettany has to win--because the movie hasn't been promoted like one in which the hero loses. The director Richard Loncraine has used CGI to make the game as visually exciting as it could be, but the predictability of the romance outcome draws the climax out excruciatingly. No amount of charm on the part of the stars can overcome the pall of generic conventions used in such a rote manner.

Hero

Currently, the romance with the least degree of irony would be Zhang Yimou's Hero. It's about knights who fight for ideas with swords, ironic only in the sense that the nameless protagonist fails in the quest he set out to accomplish, though not in the one he comes to accept. He poses as a man who has eliminated legendarily invincible assassins intent on killing Qin Shi Huangdi, the infamously cruel first emperor of China, and manages himself to get within killing distance of him. But the emperor, who wants to hear this "hero" recount his exploits, is shrewd enough to see through his various yarns, told successively in varying dominant-color schemes. In the process of drawing him out the emperor changes both the assassin's attitude and his own. The result is the unification of the nation.