Mark Reviews Movies: THE ROYAL

The Royal, Samuel Goldwyn Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 14, 2022

In 1980, Willie Mays Aikens was rising-star slugger in professional baseball, hitting two homeruns—one pair on his 26th birthday—in two different games of that year's World Series, which was a first-time feat in the league. Fourteen years later, after the collapse of his career from drug use, he would be tried and convicted for selling a couple of ounces of crack cocaine to an undercover police officer. Because of federal guidelines for minimum sentencing, Aikens was sentenced to more than 20 years in a federal penitentiary. If it had been regular powder cocaine, the equivalent sentence would have been about two years.

All of that information comes immediately and concisely at the start of The Royal. Director Marcel Sarmiento's movie is technically a sports biography, albeit without any actual sports being played—save for a couple flashbacks and in some archival footage—and one that concentrates exclusively on a few-year period of its subject's life. That the subject himself served as a producer might partially explain why the movie bypasses some of the less-complimentary parts of this story and frames the entire narrative as a move toward an uplifting comeback.

Still, there's still some rough and tough honesty to be found in Gregory W. Jordan's screenplay (an adaptation of his non-fiction book on Aikens). There's also quite a bit that makes this story feel far more conventional than it actually is—and less incisive, both about the man at the center and the legal issues that brought him so low, than it probably should be.

The story begins, not with Aikens' career or arrest, but with his early release from an Atlanta prison in 2008. Given probation and an order to return to Kansas City (where he had played for the local professional team), Willie (Amin Joseph) has found religion and a sense of purpose in trying to re-unite his family: his wife Sara (Andrea Navedo) and the couple's 17-year-old daughter Camila (Olivia Taylor Cruz). Both of them are currently living in Mexico, but Willie hopes to have a home ready for them soon.

The troubles for Willie's hope of a new life start early. His first stop is back to his childhood home in South Carolina, to reminisce about his youth (His old little league coach, played by Michael Beach, helps him get around town and chides him for letting down so many people) and visit his mother, who is suffering from dementia and doesn't recognize her son.

That unscheduled and unsanctioned stop gets him off on the wrong foot with his parole officer (played by LisaRaye McCoy) in Kansas City, and that's more bad news for Willie. It's up to her discretion whether he'll live in a halfway house or be allowed to move back to his home. If there's a negative to how much conflict and how many obstacles Jordan's screenplay focuses on during the first act, it's in how much Willie is defined by those barriers, as well as how contrived the piling-on starts to feel (Even stories based on real people can lose a sense of storytelling and character in a concentration on events).

The positive is that, for the most part, these external forces become non-issues. Willie arranges a return to his home, and Sara and Camila join him soon enough. From here, the story does become about Willie trying to adjust to having a family he believed he lost more than a decade ago, struggling to connect to a daughter who has only known her father as an absence, dealing with his desire to return to drugs and alcohol, and coming to the realization that, while the sport and its higher-ups might be done with him, he isn't yet finished with baseball.

His age and a bad hip obviously mean that he won't play again (He can't even make contact with a ball in a batting cage at first). There is always the chance, though, that he could coach. Meanwhile, his attorney (played by Elisabeth Rohm) wants Willie to be more public and vocal about the unjust federal laws that took away such a large chunk of his life, but for reasons that aren't exactly clarified beyond fear of speaking or of being re-condemned by the public again, he wants no part of that.

Parts of each of these through lines are quite effective. The relationship between Willie and his daughter is filled with resentment on her part and constant frustration on his, which only makes tensions worse. A scene with former teammate George Brett (Nic Bishop) shows the guy to be aware of his old friend's struggles with addiction, and the way Willie frankly discusses that struggle cuts to the core of it—much more authentically than an awkward scene in which Willie is tempted to buy a bottle of booze.

Jordan's performance is sturdily melancholy, if a bit too generically so at times. Part of that occasional shortcoming might simply be because the filmmakers don't see The Royal as a study of guilt, regret, anger with oneself and various systems, and the hard work it takes to re-claim one's own life and sense of purpose. It's intended to be an uplifting tale, with a set and inevitable ending, and getting to the point seems more important than confronting the hard truths and personal challenges this character could be confronting instead.

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