Review: Borg vs McEnroe (15)

It's not often that Shia LaBeouf is the best thing in a movie, but in Borg vs McEnroe he's well cast as John McEnroe, the one-time enfant terrible of American tennis who set-out to stop the preternaturally cool Swede BjÃ¶rn Borg (Sverrir Gudnason) from winning his fifth Wimbledon title in a row in an epic five-set showdown in 1980.

RIVALS: Sverrir Gudnason and Shia LaBeouf in Borg vs McEnroe.

The film is built around that final and the build up to it, and though it’s ostensibly about both players, director Janus Metz weighs the drama in Borg’s favour, turning the film into a psychodrama about a player wrestling with the toll taken by constantly burying his emotions for the sake of success. It’s not the most scintillating side of the rivalry and Gudnason, who looks eerily like Bjorg, never really gets under his character’s skin in a way that suggests there’s much more to him than a hyper-focussed professional who learned early on that the only way he could fulfil his desire to be the best player in the world was to channel everything into the game.

LaBeouf, however, brings the film alive whenever he’s on screen and, thanks to some CGI augmentation, the tennis looks convincing enough.

If there’s a major fault it’s the way the film suggests McEnroe had to change his attitude a bit before he became truly great. But, of course, tennis didn’t change him. He changed tennis.