Challengers, the latest film from director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name), thrives on energy -- the energy generated by competition, the energy that ripples through tennis matches, the energy that underlies sexual attraction, and, most of all, the energy of youth.
Slick to a fault, Challengers pumps adrenalin into a plot that never wanders far from a surface in which the story's conflicts are so clearly drawn they might as well have been marked with chalk lines.
Built around a love triangle, Challengers spans 13 years in the lives of three characters, telling its story in flashbacks from a 2019 tournament that builds toward a fierce but ambiguous conclusion.
Tennis players Art and Patrick (Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor) renew a long-standing rivalry when both enter a challenger event, a low-grade competition in which A-list Art is supposed to tune up his flagging game.
O'Connor's Patrick has spent his life scuffling through a small-time career that has left him living in his car. He's familiar with tennis's lower rungs. You might think of him as a tennis bum.
Both players are under the sway of Zendaya's Tashi, a once-rising tennis star whose career was derailed by a knee injury. A ferocious competitor, Zendaya eventually marries Art and channels her competitive drives into managing his career.
Working from a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, Guadagnino moves the story backward and forward, picking up fragments of backstory that could have served as pieces of a tantalizing jigsaw but knock the story off track.
On or off court, Zendaya is the movie's driving force, commanding the screen as the woman who's coveted by Art and Patrick, both of whom are struck by Tashi’s charisma. In a scene set early in the story, Art and Patrick watch Tashi play and invite her to their motel room.
Tashi initiates a simultaneous make-out session with both guys, unmasking the homoerotic tension that underlies the young men's adolescent friendship. Now 18, they’ve known each other since they were 12.
From the start, Tashi makes herself into a prize to be earned in a competition between the two young players. During the motel scene, she piques their desire but leaves, promising her phone number to the one who wins his match.
Years pass and the two teenagers grow into men. Tashi marries Art, but Patrick stays in the picture. He may not have achieved Art's level of tennis success, but he thinks he has Art's number — both on the court and in matters concerning Tashi.
By the time the movie's final match arrives, Art has grown tired of high-pressure competition but worries that failure might cause Tashi to move on. Patrick thinks he has one more shot at the big time. Of course, they have to slam balls at each other in a showdown match. Balls hit rackets with plenty of whack.
Guadagnino's camera works its way through matches, meet-ups, and closeups, practically insisting that we yield to its power.
All of this plays against a musical score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that functions like a flashing red light, signaling whenever the dramatic stakes are about to rise.
Despite a willing and watchable cast and Guadagnino’s directorial star turn, Challengers seldom deepens the immediacy it works so hard to create. Put another way, there's less here than meets the eye.
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