Challengers (2024)

I've been very apprehensive about Luca Guadagnino's new film ever since I saw the trailer. Guadagnino is an interesting director, and I've liked his work in the past; most notably A Bigger Splash (2015) his remake of Jacques Deray's 1969 film La Piscine, and more recently Call Me by Your Name (2017).

Challengers surrounds a love triangle between three tennis players; two of them best friends played by Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor who are both obsessed with Tashi (Zendaya), herself a prodigy before her career is cut short by injury.

The film surrounds a match being played in the current day between former best buds Patrick (O'Connor) and Art (Faist), while we flick back and forth to different times over that past fifteen years or so, to find out how we got to this stage. That stage is a challenger tournament, part of the notoriously tough challenger circuit which is one tier under the professional ATP tour. Patrick is there, barley able to scrape together enough money to enter the tournament whilst Art (at this point married to Tashi) has entered purely to get some wins together to up his confidence ahead of the US Open.

Why the pair now hate each other becomes obvious as we entertain the flashbacks, and Guadagnino's film then slots into familiar territory with its lust and love overtaking rational thinking, especially in the cases of Art and Patrick.

It's been twenty years since Wimbledon (2004), the British romcom starring Kirsten Dunst and Paul Bettany which wasn't about tennis- it was just that, a romantic comedy with a very British edge to it. The CGI tennis itself was execrable, and the basic facts of tennis and the historical tournament that is Wimbledon were all swept to one side in favour of romance. The tennis didn't matter, and even though I'm a huge tennis fan and found much to moan about from a tennis side of things, Wimbledon was a harmless comedy, and frequently enjoyable.

Challengers sells itself as a film that's about lust and love in the tennis arena, with three tennis players who all want to be the best. This means that their relationships are ingrained in both the sport and each other, so for the film to work, you have to believe in the relationships and the tennis. And, twenty years on since the appalling CGI of Wimbledon, you'd think the least they'd be able to do, would be to recreate a realistic representation of the sport.

But Challengers fails badly.

It's getting straight four and five stars from critics, presumably none of whom are tennis fans. This wouldn't matter so much if the sport wasn't key to the relationships, but it is; especially the final match between the pair of them. It's the key to the film, and the basics of the sport are just got badly wrong. Patrick misses a first serve, and is then given a time violation in-between first and second serves.

You can't get a time violation in-between your first and seconds serves.

He also holds his racket halfway up the handle during the match, like a three year old child might do. There's also a 'Set Break' after the first game of the third set. That's not a set break then is it?

But more importantly, the movement is key to this sport, and you don't believe in any of it, it's all over the place.

The performances are very good, especially Zendaya, who I've previously been pretty unimpressed by. As is the excellent score, performed by the ever reliable Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. But I just couldn't sympathise with any of the decisions made by the characters; if you want the glory of the sport this badly (which it's made clear to us they do)- then don't do the things they do. The longer it goes on the more annoyed I got, and really struggled to believe that any of them would still be trusting any of the others- all the while surrounded by a match that just looks and feels ridiculous.

The final shot of the film underlines all the frustrations of what have come before, after we have just had to sit through one of the most unbelievable passages of tennis that has ever been put to screen- it's like something from a Mario Tennis game.

This has been done well before. Janus Pederson's film Borg Vs McEnroe (2017) was a very good portrayal of the infamous game between Borg and McEnroe at Wimbledon in 1980, and the tennis in the film itself was admirable. So it seems odd that Guadagnino can't offer us the same positivity here; perhaps he feels the film's more about the characters.

But you can't believe in the characters if you don't believe in the world they're living in. And that's a huge problem. 4.5/10