Challengers gets all 30 - love and triple deuce in this tennis romantic drama wherein two tennis partners fall for the same girl. Is it game, set, and match?
No.
The plot is quite unsurprising and by the 23-minute mark, you can pretty much guess scene for scene what is going to happen until the credits. Challengers is littered with tennis scenes as well as plenty of heavy petting and that is pretty much it. It is all style and menial substance. Get the boys topless, get Zendaya in skimpy and revealing clothing and boom movie! The plot follows Patrick Zweig and Art Donaldson, Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist respectively, two close friends and tennis partners who are driven apart by their love for Tashi Duncan, Zendaya.
The film flashes forward and back 13 years to when the love triangle first starts and when the two (now older) men are playing for their careers. On top of this, there are several time shifts throughout the modern-day setting so there is a lot of jumping around, so much so you don’t really get comfortable. Additionally, the efforts to show how young the cast are 13 years ago are quite average. The cast has long hair, namely Tashi Duncan, and the two young boys are clean-shaven with floppy hair. In the modern scenes, Duncan has short hair and no sign that she has had a child or aged at all. The men have shorter haircuts and stubble, and that is about it. Several scenes bleed into each other at times, so you are not sure where you are in the timeline. The poor efforts to show these characters in different stages of their life were on par with a flashback in the SAW movies wherein John Kramer, the Jigsaw killer wears a cap to show that he is younger (see picture below).
Moreover, the characters are largely unlikable. Two of the characters in the love triangle are simply awful people who give in to their desires without a second thought even though they know full well their actions trample on the love of others. Another character is just a bit of a bore. The end result of these poorly created characters is that you just don’t really care about them. There aren’t many scenes showing the personal struggle of the characters trying to overcome their feelings versus their ethical constitution. Most of Challengers is just plot point to plot point; one male character does or says something which results in Duncan to do X to the other male character.
The specific effects in this movie are also of mediocre quality. For example, the tennis scenes mainly use a CGI tennis ball. This sees the characters hit the ball from the baseline and the ball flies right into the camera or right beside it. So through almost every tennis scene, the viewer is blasted with a tennis ball flying right into their face which is quite unsettling. I kept on looking around the room during these scenes because my automatic response was to finch or shift away. Moreover, the ball play was insanely fast. It moved so much faster than in real life. This is probably because a slower CGI ball would look worse and a sped-up one would help mask the CGI. In any case, it shows that special effects still aren’t quite there yet and for this movie to have a bit more substance to it, they could have used you know, a real ball. Secondly, there were two scenes in the film where it was windy. How do we know it was windy? There were hundreds of pieces of paper flying about and waste debris. It just looked ridiculous. Unless there was a plot point where the film was situated next to a paper mill, that amount of paper is obscene and detracts from the point of the scenes. For example, there is one scene where two characters are surrounded by a whirlwind of paper rubbish. Yes, there is a meaning behind it however your focus is on why there is so much rubbish flying around and not the emotional intensity of the scene.
To end on a positive note, the soundtrack is very good. It engages the audience with a good variety of high-octane beats which drive up the intensity of the scene.
In sum, Challengers is an okay film, it gets skimpy and racey but lacks the gravitas you’d want from a drama.
Rating: Quarter-final exit.