Current:Home > NewsReview: Zendaya's 'Challengers' serves up saucy melodrama – and some good tennis, too -Aspire Money Growth
Review: Zendaya's 'Challengers' serves up saucy melodrama – and some good tennis, too
View
Date:2025-04-14 04:46:06
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! (3573)
Related
- Questlove charts 50 years of SNL musical hits (and misses)
- Biden headed to Milwaukee a week before Republican presidential debate
- Robbie Robertson, guitarist for The Band, dies at age 80
- Mishmash of how US heat death are counted complicates efforts to keep people safe as Earth warms
- Trump invites nearly all federal workers to quit now, get paid through September
- What did a small-town family do with a $1.586 billion Powerball win?
- What went wrong in Maui? As 'cataclysmic' fires grew, many heard no warnings
- Seattle Mariners fan surprises Félix Hernández at team's Hall of Fame ceremony
- Federal Spending Freeze Could Have Widespread Impact on Environment, Emergency Management
- Parts of Maui are in ashes after wildfires blazed across the Hawaiian island. These photos show the destruction.
Ranking
- Backstage at New York's Jingle Ball with Jimmy Fallon, 'Queer Eye' and Meghan Trainor
- Activist in Niger with ties to junta tells the AP region needs to ‘accept new regime’ or risk war
- Shippers warned to stay away from Iranian waters over seizure threat as US-Iran tensions high
- The birth of trap music and the rise of southern hip-hop
- Could Bill Belichick, Robert Kraft reunite? Maybe in Pro Football Hall of Fame's 2026 class
- West Virginia University outlines proposed program and faculty cuts
- Amidst streaming chaos, Dropout carves out its own niche
- Minneapolis police search for suspects in backyard shooting that left 1 dead and 6 wounded
Recommendation
Jamie Foxx reps say actor was hit in face by a glass at birthday dinner, needed stitches
1 more person charged in Alabama riverboat brawl; co-captain says he 'held on for dear life'
Georgia judge needs more time in lawsuit over blocking the state’s ban on gender-affirming care
Skull found at Arizona preserve identified as belonging to missing Native American man
EU countries double down on a halt to Syrian asylum claims but will not yet send people back
Police: New York inmate used bed sheets to escape from hospital's 5th floor
Tale as old as time: Indicators of the Week
California judge who's charged with murder allegedly texted court staff: I just shot my wife. I won't be in tomorrow.