Rating: R | Runtime: 131 minutes
Release Date: April 26th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: United Artists Releasing / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Director(s): Luca Guadagnino
Writer(s): Justin Kuritzkes

I’m taking such good care of my little white boys.

I thought I was being punked when Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) starts to serve at the beginning of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. He lifts his racket behind his head before tossing the ball and no one is laughing in the stands? Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) should be so distracted by the sheer lunacy of what he’s seeing that he can’t attempt to return it. Yet the scene simply moves along as though nothing is amiss. It simply pretends that someone could actually get past high school tennis without having that idiosyncrasy beaten out of them. And then Justin Kuritzkes’ script tells us that Patrick went to a private tennis boarding school?! It must be a joke.

The fact that this serve is a crucial plot point for which the climax hinges upon should make me hate the finished product and yet I must admit I truly enjoyed myself once I got on its level. Kuritzkes and Guadagnino are leaning into the absurdity of the situation, letting chaos reign so we can sit back and eat our popcorn as the mess unfolds on-screen. None of this is serious. None of it makes sense. Not as a sports movie and not as a romantic throuple worth investing in beyond watching them wryly smile when stabbing each other in the back. Challengers is soap-y melodrama spanning over a decade to reveal its One True Pairing was always Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya) and tennis itself.

Not that this comes as a surprise. As soon as she admits to these boys—both of whom can’t stop drooling for a second to really listen—that her love affair has always been with the sport, we should be keenly aware of where this will all lead. Tashi is so smitten with tennis that she can only allow fifteen seconds of her latest match to even be called by its name. It’s why her flirtations with “Fire and Ice” prove so manipulative as opposed to sexy. She doesn’t want either of them. She’ll use them if they let her. For sex? Sure. But their real purpose is as raw material to mold for her true beau. Art and Patrick have the goods to serve tennis if they’re willing to give themselves to its beauty like she has.

This is why it’s somewhat difficult to get into the movie at first. It all feels fake with stilted dialogue and over-the-top, cartoonish action until you are able to vibe with its real intentions. There’s this veneer of superficiality wherein the actors are being made to play roles as written despite them being nowhere near authentic depictions of human beings. Its heightened emotional warfare is in service of an otherwise shallow narrative because the plot is secondary. Heck, it’s less than secondary. We just don’t know it yet because the characters are so one-dimensional.

I did always love the structure of it, though. Everything plays as flashbacks against the backdrop of a “challenger” event—the sort of minor league circuit tournament that those who aren’t good enough to be gifted a ticket to the Grand Slams play as a means of qualifying for the qualifiers. Patrick is there because he’s never been able to check his ego and let the sport take control. Art is there because he’s lost his drive to keep letting it. Tashi, the latter’s coach/wife and the former’s ex-girlfriend, forces Art to play in the hopes easy competition will give him his confidence back. Unfortunately, Patrick, his estranged BFF and ex-doubles partner, is undefeated against him.

That’s when it gets good. Namely because of Josh O’Connor. Whether it’s that he’s by far the best actor of the trio or Kuritzkes was just able to write one of his characters light-years better than the others, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, the moment Patrick tells Tashi to “fuck off” after she plants the seed to be for him in the past what we’ve already discovered she’s become for Art in the present (or, perhaps it’s better described as planting the seed for him to become what Art always was—a doormat), is the moment I sat up straight. Finally, some teeth are bared. Finally, we see what it is she sees in him despite Art being everything she needs to satisfy the tennis Gods. Finally, we see why Art lost his personality the moment Patrick went away.

The rest of the film gains life in the aftermath and the head games being played all find a second layer as a result. The tennis is still laughable (Guadagnino shoots it in a way to feign exhilaration despite the actors moving and swinging like the tennis ball was added in post—and don’t get me started about the “ball cam” and “chest cam” moments at the end) and the characters still pawns to a script that loves to wink at itself, but O’Connor’s transformation into a trickster spoiler provides the suspense and allure necessary to invest anyway. Because what angle is he really playing? Is he trying to destroy Art and Tashi’s love? Or is he trying to wake them both up from the doldrums that love ultimately wrought?

---

(L to R) Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O’Connor in CHALLENGERS; courtesy Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures.