BATTLE OF THE SEXES  3.2***

    A sports story based on the highly publicized  tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs and which was one of the most watched televised sports events of all time, reaching 90 million viewers around the world.  

In 1973 Billie Jean King (Emma stone), and other professional women tennis players, were sick of getting paid peanuts compared to the male pros. So they start their own women's tournament, and find sponsoring through a cigarette company. Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) is a retired ex-champion tennis player, who also thinks he should be paid more money for a game than he's currently being offered, and he sees a chance to make a lot of money by challenging Billie Jean King to a match. King knows it's all a publicity stunt for Riggs, so she's reluctant to accept his challenge, but then she feels obligated to defend all of women tennis players, by participating in the match after he defeats Margaret Court , the then number 1 women’s player.

The movie is funny, surprisingly emotional, and inspiring too. Both Stone and Carell are fantastic in the lead roles, and I really like how the filmmakers didn't make Bobby Riggs the 'bad guy' of the movie. He was obviously doing it just to get back in the game, and make some money in the process, and he's actually a somewhat sympathetic character. The real villain in this story is not Riggs, but Jack Kramer, (a smug Bill Pullman) the head of the Association of Tennis Professionals, whose unapologetic institutional sexism pervaded the sport at the time. We come to learn that Kramer's genuine disdain for women's equality is one of the motivating factors that  light a fire under King.

  Stone, as King, is also excellent and  makes a great badass heroine in the movie too. There are some classic intense dialogue scenes as well, and some intimate emotional ones too. It's an all-around really well made, and an effective movie  And my, wife, Sara agrees.

Rated PG-13 for some sexual content and partial nudity