When it comes to the Big Three who have dominated men’s tennis for the past two decades, I’ve always favored Roger Federer over rivals Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. Federer’s game had a multi-surface brilliance and beauty that rarely got obscured by anything extraneous — off-court drama, on-court excesses. You could marvel at the reliable wizardry of a Federer performance and just assume that, in his utterly wholesome boringness, he wouldn’t let you down as a person either.
And that’s the furthest thing from an insult. Roger Federer always presented as a completely decent person and a miraculous tennis player. So when I call and ‘s , a new documentary premiering at ahead of its Amazon airing, comfortably dull, that’s another way of saying that it’s probably precisely the documentary that Federer would have wanted made about himself.
There’s worthwhile emotion that comes from the filmmakers’ ample access to Federer and many of his contemporaries as they muse on the end of an era, made all the more poignant by the recent French Open fates of Nadal and Djokovic. Plus, it’s generally entertaining to watch Federer highlights. But it would be difficult to convince anybody without a pre-existing interest that this constitutes compelling storytelling on any level.
Focusing, as the title suggests, on the 12-day period between Federer’s announcement of his retirement and his final performance, a doubles match with Nadal at the 2022 Laver Cup, is a story abo.