Movie Review: ‘Challengers’ Funniest Moments Come When it’s Trying Too Hard to be Serious

Rating: 47/100

Sports movies have been a staple of Hollywood since the beginning of the movie industry, and whatever the sport you can think of, there’s usually at least one example of a famous and beloved film about that sport. Football has Rudy, baseball has Field of Dreams and A League of Their Own, hockey has Miracle and The Mighty Ducks, basketball has Hoop Dreams and Love and Basketball, and even golf has Happy Gilmore, Tin Cup, and Caddyshack. So what’s the great tennis movie?

A quick Google search for movies about tennis brings up a bunch of films you’ve never heard of, and one film you may have heard of but which is from a famous sexual predator of a director whose name I won’t mention. Even King Richard, despite its lead actor winning an Oscar (immediately after slapping the host of the Oscars) seems to have been largely forgotten about. It seems like tennis might just be the sport that’s too dull to really make a great movie out of. But in Challengers, director Luca Guadagnino and writer Justin Kuritzkes are banking on the hope that, if you put a half-naked, sex-crazed Zendaya into a film about tennis, maybe people will forget how boring tennis is. It didn’t work.

Challengers is the story of two former best friends, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), as the two are reunited to duke it out in one last match. As their match unfolds, we get a series of flashbacks to explain how the two friends, once doubles champions together in the Junior Open, ended their friendship by competing over a girl, women’s tennis star Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). While their rivalry for Tashi first resulted in Patrick and Tashi becoming a couple, it was Art who finally married Tashi, driving a wedge between the two friends, which starts to become evident in their heated tennis match.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino is probably best-known for his 2017 queer coming-of-age film Call Me By Your Name, which I never understood the appeal of, as I couldn’t get past the inappropriateness of a 17-year-old falling for a 24-year-old, or the fact that that 24-year-old was played by Armie Hammer who has since been revealed to be rather problematic. The writer, Justin Kuritzkes, is a playwright and novelist who has never written for film before, but has recently written two screenplays that are both directed by Guadagnino, this one and an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ 1985 novel Queer. Frankly, I would have been much more excited to see Queer than I was to see Challengers.

The film tries to pull off a sexy soap opera vibe, hoping that this love triangle will work if you make these attractive people just horny enough. And it is a sexy movie; there’s no question about that. But there’s not much there beneath all the sex and petty fighting because, at their core, these are three unpleasant and unlikable characters. In a way, that’s what you’d expect from a black comedy, which is what this movie is trying to be. Black comedies revel in unlikable characters who are satirized and even punished during the course of the movie, which is basically the source of the humor. But Challengers doesn’t ever go dark enough to become the type of black comedy it wants to be, leaving us with three vapid and shallow narcissists who seem like they belong in a much darker film.

Furthermore, the fact that the three characters are so unlikable is made worse by the fact that there are virtually no other characters in the film. The characters’ opponents in most of the matches are left as anonymous figures with almost no lines. The characters’ rich parents are always somewhere off in the distance supporting their children financially but never showing up to contribute to the plot. Aside from one scene where Patrick has an excruciatingly awkward interaction with one of the tournament officials, there are basically no supporting characters.

The homoerotic tension between Patrick and Art could have added some decent subtext to the film, highlighting another reason why the two best friends now can’t stand each other’s company. But, instead, the underlying sexual tension between the two male leads is mostly played for laughs, particularly in one scene where Tashi lures the boys into a three-way make out session only to trick them into making out with each other. Sadly, that’s the closest this film comes to any sort of overt queer representation.

If Guadagnino has any sense of subtlety as a director, he completely abandoned it for Challengers. At times, that can be interesting, creating some really compelling cinematography and really gripping shots. The shot of Tashi standing in a windstorm as dust and debris swirl around her was powerful, and the POV shots of tennis players was an oddly intriguing choice.

But a lot of the times that the movie is trying to be serious end up resulting in unintentional humor because of that lack of subtlety. In one of the film’s climactic scenes, there’s a slow-motion shot of Art looking particularly intense and dripping sweat onto the camera that seemed like it was meant to be the most tense scene in the film. Instead, this scene was greeted with laughter at the theater I was in, and rightfully so. Despite the film being officially labeled a comedy (mostly out of a lack of a more appropriate categorization), it takes itself far too seriously and results in an audience that’s laughing at the movie and not with it.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that Nine Inch Nails members Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross created all of the music for the film. Personally, when I think of a movie about tennis, industrial music doesn’t immediately spring to mind. But then, that seems to be another part of this film’s attempt to make tennis sexy somehow. Reznor’s music creates some tension, but, again, this becomes a film taking itself too seriously, and Reznor is the king of taking oneself too seriously, resulting in a lot of scenes where the intense music just doesn’t match what’s happening in the scene. It’s hard to make tennis seem dramatic enough to justify using Reznor’s music for it.

The level of casual male nudity in this movie is truly shocking, particularly in one scene in a men’s locker room where everyone’s dick is just hanging out like that’s not a big deal. On the one hand, after decades of seeing women sexually objectified in movies, it was somewhat refreshing to see a movie where the men are naked for seemingly no good reason while the film’s only female character never takes off her underwear. As a lesbian, however, I don’t particularly have a desire to go see a movie that’s likely to have about a dozen penises in it that are practically set decoration as opposed to a necessary part of the movie’s plot.

The ending of the movie is utterly predictable. It leaves a lot up in the air, but that was inevitable, as this movie is all about the tension between these two characters, and breaking that tension between them in any way after building it up for two hours wouldn’t really make much sense. The only way out this movie has is to leave a lot of things unresolved, which it inevitably does. Unfortunately, that’s not a very satisfying way to end a movie like this. It’s just one more element in this movie that doesn’t quite achieve what it’s trying to, causing the whole thing to collapse under its own weight.

Will there ever be an exciting and fun movie about tennis? It’s certainly possible. But tennis films would probably do well to take advice from golf films, as the best films about golf lean into the fact that the sport is boring and make a mockery out of that. Happy Gilmore works because a character whose personality is the polar opposite of what we’ve come to expect from a golfer is inserted into the rigid and dull sport, making for a great source of humor. It might just be that the best way to make a good movie about tennis would be to make it funny. While Challengers claims to be a comedy, it’s really not, as I don’t think Guadagnino is capable of relaxing enough to make a true comedy. Instead, the film becomes a drama with stakes that are far too low to get excited about, and the movie falls well short of what it wants to be.

Challengers opens in theaters this Friday, April 26.

Photo courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures.