Current:Home > ScamsReview: Zendaya's 'Challengers' serves up saucy melodrama – and some good tennis, too -ValueMetric
Review: Zendaya's 'Challengers' serves up saucy melodrama – and some good tennis, too
View
Date:2025-04-13 18:04:04
The saucy tennis melodrama “Challengers” is all about the emotional games we play with each other, though there are certainly enough volleys, balls and close-up sweat globules if you’re more into jockstraps than metaphors.
Italian director Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name”) puts an art-house topspin on the sports movie, with fierce competition, even fiercer personalities and athletic chutzpah set to the thumping beats of a techno-rific Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score. “Challengers” (★★★ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) centers on the love triangle between doubles partners-turned-rivals (Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor) and a teen wunderkind (Zendaya) and how lust, ambition and power dynamics evolve their relationships over the course of 13 years.
The movie opens with Art (Faist) and Tashi (Zendaya) as the It couple of pro tennis: He’s eyeing a U.S. Open title, the only tournament he’s never won, while she’s his intense coach, manager and wife, a former sensation along the lines of a Venus or Serena whose career was cut short by a gnarly knee injury. To build up his flagging confidence after recent losses, Tashi enters Art in a lower-level event that he can dominate – until he faces ex-bestie Patrick (O’Connor) in the final match.
Justin Kuritzkes’ soapy screenplay bounces between that present and the trios’ complicated past via flashbacks, starting when Art and Patrick – a ride-or-die duo known as “Fire and Ice” – both have eyes for Tashi. All three are 18 and the hormones are humming: The boys have been tight since they were preteens at boarding school, but a late-night, three-way makeout session, and the fact that she’ll only give her number to whoever wins the guys' singles match, creates a seismic crack that plays itself out over the coming years.
All three main actors ace their arcs and changing looks over time – that’s key in a nonlinear film like this that’s all over the place. As Tashi, Zendaya plays a woman who exudes an unshakable confidence, though her passion for these two men is seemingly her one weakness. Faist (“West Side Story”) crafts Art as a talented precision player whose love for the game might not be what it once was, while O’Connor (“The Crown”) gives Patrick a charming swagger with and without a racket, even though his life has turned into a bit of a disaster.
From the start, the men's closeness hints at something more than friendship, a quasi-sexual tension that Tashi enjoys playing with: She jokes that she doesn’t want to be a “homewrecker” yet wears a devilish smile when Art and Patrick kiss, knowing the mess she’s making.
Tennis is “a relationship,” Tashi informs them, and Guadagnino uses the sport to create moments of argumentative conversation as well as cathartic release. Propelled by thumping electronica, his tennis scenes mix brutality and grace, with stylish super-duper close-ups and even showing the ball’s point of view in one dizzying sequence. Would he do the same with, say, curling or golf? It’d be cool to see because more often than not, you want to get back to the sweaty spectacle.
Guadagnino could probably make a whole movie about masculine vulnerability in athletics rather than just tease it with “Challengers,” with revealing bits set in locker rooms and saunas. But the movie already struggles with narrative momentum, given the many tangents in Tashi, Art and Patrick’s thorny connections: While not exactly flabby, the film clocks in at 131 minutes and the script could use the same toning up as its sinewy performers.
While “Challengers” falls nebulously somewhere between a coming-of-age flick, dysfunctional relationship drama and snazzy sports extravaganza, Guadagnino nevertheless holds serve with yet another engaging, hot-blooded tale of flawed humans figuring out their feelings.
veryGood! (1572)
Related
- A Georgia governor’s latest work after politics: a children’s book on his cats ‘Veto’ and ‘Bill’
- Russia launches its largest drone attack on Ukraine since start of invasion
- Kenya raises alarm as flooding death toll rises to 76, with thousands marooned by worsening rains
- Caretaker charged in death of her partner and grandmother in Maine
- New Orleans mayor’s former bodyguard making first court appearance after July indictment
- Purdue back at No. 1 in AP Top 25, Arizona up to No. 2; ‘Nova, BYU, Colorado State jump into top 20
- The Excerpt podcast: Israel-Hamas cease-fire's second day, Adult Survivors act expires
- Jennifer Lopez Will Explore Publicly Scrutinized Love Life in This Is Me…Now Film
- Former Milwaukee hotel workers charged with murder after video shows them holding down Black man
- Flight recorder recovered from Navy spy plane that overshot runway in Hawaii
Ranking
- From bitter rivals to Olympic teammates, how Lebron and Steph Curry became friends
- Natalie Portman on children working in entertainment: 'I don't believe that kids should work'
- FAQ: Annual climate negotiations are about to start. Do they matter?
- Ravens vs. Chargers Sunday Night Football highlights: Baltimore keeps perch atop AFC
- Chief beer officer for Yard House: A side gig that comes with a daily swig.
- Jill Biden says White House decor designed for visitors to see the holidays through a child’s eyes
- Is it better to take Social Security at 62 or 67? It depends.
- A New Law Regulating the Cosmetics Industry Expands the FDA’s Power But Fails to Ban Toxic Chemicals in Beauty Products
Recommendation
US appeals court rejects Nasdaq’s diversity rules for company boards
Horoscopes Today, November 25, 2023
What Lou Holtz thinks of Ohio State's loss to Michigan: 'They aren't real happy'
Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy Slams Rumors He’s Dating VPR Alum Raquel Leviss
Olympic women's basketball bracket: Schedule, results, Team USA's path to gold
The 40 Best Cyber Monday Deals on Celebrity Brands: SKIMS, Good American, Jordan, Fenty Beauty, and More
Emily Hand, Israeli-Irish 9-year-old girl who was believed killed by Hamas, among hostages freed from Gaza
College football coaching carousel: A look at who has been hired and fired this offseason