I have probably already noted it before, but I will state it again, I love a sports movie. I love them when they are formulaic or when they tread their own ground. Challengers is at its best when it’s a sports movie. The sport itself is dynamic. You are engaged in the action on the court. It is during these scenes that all three characters, Tashi (played by Zendaya), Art (played by Mike Faist), and Patrick (played by Josh O’Connor) shine.
Despite it being in, I think most of the trailers if not all of them and thus giving me plenty of time to prepare to look away, there were apparently a number of people still very shocked when Tashi broke her leg based on the gasps I heard. Considering it looks like they used a mannequin to capture a more real break, I can understand their gasps.
The main marketing for the film however has not been on the sport, but on the romance, the love triangle of the three characters – one implied in some of the marketing to maybe be a little polyamorous. And this is where the film is not at its strongest. It centers Tashi as someone both of the guys are attracted to and they are very explicit that at her core, Tashi’s just attracted to good tennis. So, she will only her number (aka the promise of a date) to whichever one of them wins against the other in their head-to-head at the Junior US Open. It reduces all the characters to one-dimensionality, and we are cheated out of any character motivations for why they really want to do or succeed at tennis other than when the guys want to be with Tashi.
This is a rare fault for director Luca Guadagnino, who’s unafraid to direct films with unconventional love stories at their heart, Bones and All comes to mind, but those films are often more concerned with character exploration than plot, whereas Challengers, concerned itself more with plot. Whether this was a feature of Justin Kuritzkes’s script, or because of changes made in production or editing, it was something I left the theater missing.
That said, I really loved the structure of the film because again, it played into the dynamism of the sport. It was also good at having you reevaluate things you thought you knew by presenting you with new information from scenes that took place earlier in the timeline, only having you witness them later. I found this to be very effective, and again, played into the tension and anticipation in the sport as you eventually waited for characters to do a callback action to a much earlier scene and watch how that would play out on the court in front of spectators. This callback I’m referencing, which did play out to rapt audience attention, was a good sports and a good character moment that connected to the plot of the film… I just wish the film had more moments like this.
Normally I am someone who likes to watch a film from the middle or further back in the auditorium but this is a film that wants to be viewed up close. It will already be losing the larger format screens this week to make way for the delightful The Fall Guy, so if you do go in theaters, I would recommend maybe sitting a row closer than you might usually to get a fuller experience.
Challengers is in theaters now.
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