The 1980 Wimbledon Men’s Championship Match was among the greatest tennis matches ever. It featured the number one player in the world (Sweden’s Bjorn Borg) seeking his fifth street title in the most famous tournament in the sport against the upstart American John McEnroe, who had quickly climbed to be the number two player in the world. Young director Janus Metz captures the history of both men and their rivalry up to this point in their careers while centering on this all-important match.

Fans of tennis will adore this match, and fans of any sports movie will find this to their liking. It’s a hold-nothing-back take on two of the most influential tennis players ever. From groundstrokes to aces to backhand slices to overhead spaces, Borg Vs. McEnroe effectively captures the in-game action. Compelling storytelling that contained tons of flashbacks of each player as a youth and the half dozen years before the tournament, as well as the other matches in the tournament that led to this culminating final, showed two true character studies that a rookie director effectively captured.

While the non-sports fan might feel lost with all of the back and forth while the non-tennis fan might get confused about some of the particulars about the sport (particularly how the sport is scored), there is enough outside of the court that will keep the audience engaged as they try to figure out these two externally very different competitors who, I think, could relate to one another in ways that they could not relate to any other person on either. Forget that you’ll never think McEnroe isn’t Shia LaBeouf (Man Down, American Honey), Borg Vs. McEnroe is a must-watch movie for most movie fans and certainly for fans of sports dramas.

Borg Vs. McEnroe might seem like the antithesis of 2017’s Battle of the Sexes, the film that showed the 1973 exhibition match between the number one woman in the world, Billie Jean King, and former men’s champion Bobby Riggs, but it wasn’t. And more about Battle of the Sexes being a sports drama that, yes, had its comedic elements but was still effective in telling an important story. Rated PG13, it was indeed much more lighthearted but equally, if not more so, important than Borg Vs. McEnroe. And it was marketed much better, though both movies made just $15 million domestically. Borg Vs. McEnroe was rated R and very much deserving of it. It received that rating because you can’t have a John McEnroe movie without all the swearing, especially his constant droppings of the F-bomb.

When I saw the trailers for each film, I thought Battle of the Sexes looked cheesy and goofy, and it was not something I would see while Borg Vs. McEnroe looked intense and a film I was looking forward to seeing. I don’t recall the latter ever being in a theatre near my home. I found it on a streaming service about eight months before this review, watched it, liked it, and completely forgot about it. This movie wasn’t considered when I was doing my End of Year Top 10 because I had completely forgotten about it. Then I saw it on someone else’s list and was completely blown away that I had forgotten to review it and about it. Too much time had passed since my viewing and potential review, so I rewatched the film. I enjoyed it even more the second time. It’s a great film.

To set the movie up in the present, McEnroe and Borg (Sverrir Gudnason – Call Girl, The Girl in the Spider’s Web) arrive in England for the 1980 tournament. Both think that they will win, but there is some hesitation in Borg. He believes that if he loses, no one will remember his four previous championships and remember this one loss, while McEnroe is convinced he will dethrone his newest rival. It’s important to note that fans of the game and tennis analysts alike seemed to be 50/50 on the 1980 match, but all agreed that the passing of the torch was inevitable. If it weren’t for Wimbledon in 1980, it would be soon after that when McEnroe defeated Borg and captured the number one world seed. From the onset, we could see that the present-day versions of these two men were opposites both on the court and off.

Labeouf was the marquee name in this film, and the trailer was billed as a 50/50 split of screentime between these two men. That wasn’t the case, though. This film heavily favored Borg, mostly with his upbringing as a young boy and teen, coached and managed by Lennart Bergelin (Stellan Skarsgård – Melancholia, Thor), with whom he sometimes had a tumultuous relationship. Borg was a different person on the court as he was learning the sport. He had outbursts that could make McEnroe look like a choir boy.

Needing to harness those emotions, an older Bergelin made a now pro-ready Borg, saying that he would need to control his outbursts and couldn’t be seen displaying that emotion when he was on the court. He molded him into a stoic champion for whom people could root. He effectively made Borg the protagonist and McEnroe the villain when, in actuality, we had two protagonists. McEnroe wasn’t an evil man. He just had violent outbursts on the court and was curt with reporters after his matches who wanted to talk about those explosive eruptions rather than the actual tennis. Sure, he had anger issues, but this didn’t make him evil. He wasn’t physically violent. He didn’t find fault in his opponents. He was angrier with himself than anything else. He took this anger out on his rackets, the net, the umpire, and more, but not his opponents.

Labeouf did a great job studying McEnroe and effectively captured his nervous ticks, remorse, and gaze when he was deep in thought about his past behavior or future possibilities. Like Borg and all other tennis fans, the culminating final between the top two players, getting through the other matches in the tournament, was just a formality. Playing McEnroe was challenging, and Labeouf is great at playing challenging characters. While he was into the part, I never saw McEnroe on the court. I always felt like I was watching Labeouf play McEnroe.

My thoughts on Labeouf as McEnroe were in stark contrast to Gudnason as Borg, and a lot (if not all) of that had to do with not knowing Gudnason. I’ve never seen a film of his before. Plus, I don’t know Borg at all. McEnroe was still playing tennis when I started paying attention to the sport. Since his retirement, he has been heavily involved in tennis as an ambassador, reporter, match commentator, and more, whereas Borg retired in his mid-20s and has been largely out of the scene ever since. Borg showed little emotion on the court in his professional career, having been conditioned by Bergelin to leave those emotions in the locker room. What was more interesting about Borg was his customs. The man did not want to lose; he could see that even the thought of a loss weighed heavily on him. His routines of sleeping in the same room in the same hotel, driving in the exact vehicle, stringing the exact same number of rackets perfectly, and a variety of other highly unique mannerisms helped further define just how enigmatic Borg was as an athlete and what drove him to do the things that he did.

The cinematography of this film was good. Centre Court at The All England Club was not glamorized in 1980 like today. It was a drab video shoot, as you might expect. Both players lacked the muscle mass that today’s athletes carry. I wonder what Labeouf and Bergelin had to do to physically resemble the kind of meek-looking athletes Born and, especially, McEnroe were. The 1980s tennis players were cut from a different mold than Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, or today’s other top stars.

Outside of the film’s leads, the other performances were rather bland. Skarsgård was very good as Borg’s manager, but Tuva Novotny (Annihilation) as Borg’s fiance, Mariana, lacked any real depth, while all those in McEnroe’s camp felt completely non-existent. It’s almost like he didn’t have a team at all. The match play was good. It was different from the match play in Battle of the Sexes, though both were intense. Like Battle of the Sexes, I will say that I did not know the result of this match. However, unlike Battle of the Sexes, where you did have a clear cheering interest, Borg Vs. McEnroe portrayed Borg as the guy you were supposed to root for (being from Sweden, that’s who the crowd in England was rooting for), but McEnroe wasn’t the typical bad guy you get as the final opponent in most sports movies. We grew with him during the film, got to see why he was the way he was and became more and more likable as we got to know him.