We Need More 'Challengers' | Review

This sexy sports love triangle should reinvigorate Hollywood

The Big Picture — Bull Durham on the tennis court.

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“Unfortunately, My Only Skill In Life Is Hitting A Ball With A Racquet.”

I am not a tennis fan.

One of the more Star-Spangled elements of my personality is that baseball is my favorite sport. I mean, what other sport could have given us the miracle that is Field of Dreams? It is a common love that connects more than a few of our regular Cinemantics contributors.

So, the elevator pitch for Challengers, a romantic drama set on the tennis courts, was not immediately appealing to me. Then a commentator said it was equivalent to a twenty-first-century Bull Durham, and I’m pretty sure my exact words were:

Having seen the movie in the first week of its release, I can confidently say that the comparison with the Kevin Costner-Tim Robbins-Susan Sarandon starring romance holds up—except for a distinct lack of saxophone.

Challengers is many things, but boring is not one of them. It’s sexy, darkly comic, and entertaining as hell.

The movie tracks a professional tennis champion (Mike Faist, the best part of Spielberg’s West Side Story) who plots a comeback with the help of his wife (Euphoria and Dune: Part Two’s Zendaya), a former tennis prodigy who retired after an injury. Standing in his way is another player (The Crown’s Josh O'Connor), who also happens to be his former best friend and wife's former lover.

It’s pretty straightforward story-wise, but its entertainment value comes from the craftsmanship and execution.

The casting of the central trio of performers was a stroke (no pun intended) of genius. Each of them is intentionally one note, almost stereotypically so, in their performance. Zendaya’s Tashi is a cold, calculating competitor who is determined to win at any cost; O’Connor’s Patrick is a comedically idiotic man-child who skates through life; Faist’s Art is a thoughtful, reserved ladder climber who is doing the wrong things for the right reasons.

Writer Justin Kuritzkes and director Luca Guadagnino give each performer a chance to shine, knowing that the movie falters if they don’t get enough time to connect with the audience. Thankfully, none of the three dropped the ball. Behind the camera, the crackling and diabolical screenplay is elevated by Guadagnino’s noted (and erotic) exploration of the human body through dizzying camerawork and Oscar-worthy editing, coupled with a dynamite score from the duo of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Wisely, Guadagnino is not gratuitous with the sex in this movie. Instead, he uses the game of tennis as a sensual stand-in. And measured by that standard, this might be the horniest movie ever made. Each match feels like an athletic courtship. In fact, Zendeya’s Tashi says as much in the film: “Tennis is like a relationship.” And unlike traditional “love triangle” movies where two people are vying for the love of the third, Challengers permits each of the three lead characters to have—spoken or unspoken—a deep attraction to the other two. The result is a palpable tension that kept the audience I watched the movie with absolutely riveted for 130 minutes.

It’s only the first week of May, but Challengers will unquestionably be among my favorites of the year when we gather with loved ones to sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve. Sure, there might have been a few minutes that could have been trimmed off around the edges, but there is little else to critique. I had a blast the whole time.

If the title of this article is any indication, Challengers ideally will be a hinge on which Hollywood swings away from the glutton of franchise fare that has dominated much of the twenty-first century.

Opening no. 1 domestically last weekend, the romantic sports drama is a rare type of movie these days: an original, non-IP-based picture relying on nothing but its young, up-and-coming actors and a steady hand behind the camera.

Now, that’s easier said than done, and the entire cultural ecosystem would need to shift to accomplish such a Herculean task.

But the seeds have been planted.

Challengers is one of four movies slated to be released this year—the others being Hit Man, Anyone but You, and The Idea of You—that are mid-budget star vehicles that Hollywood forgot people enjoyed once Iron Man came to town. If Robert Downey Jr. helped usher in the new age, then it might take the combined effort of Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Glen Powell, and Sydney Sweeney to help bring it to an end.

One can only hope.

If those films do box office numbers similar to Challengers and generate the required word-of-mouth, it may signal that our long cinematic nightmare might be coming to an end.

Regardless of whether it brings down the franchise behemoths or not, we need more of these movies in the world: original, funny, weird, and singular. I think that is what made this movie-watching experience so memorable. It felt like I was taking in rarified air.

Do you plan on watching Challengers? What are your favorite sports movies? Let us know in the comments below!