Hold on, how is it that there really isn’t a big weekend release this past weekend? OK, there were one or two new ones, but I didn’t see a single trailer for any of them, and so I was left to wonder what I would go out to see. Short answer: the Zendaya-starring tennis movie Challengers, a movie whose trailer I had seen many times and suggested she would be playing the hearts of two young men on and off the court. That’s not quite an accurate description of the movie, but trailers have been known to lie to get butts in seats, and she is the big name actor in the cast.
I will say this: good for her for doing this. Given she usually seems to play high schoolers, love interests to guys with superpowers, or in the case of the Spider-Man movies she’s made, sometimes both. This role is really a different sort of part for her, and she made the absolute most of it.
The movie opens with world class pro tennis player Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) in a bit of a professional slump, so his wife and coach Tashi (Zendaya) suggests he sign up for a small local tournament in New Rochelle, New York to get his tennis grove back on. Meanwhile, Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), a very down on his luck pro who has been living out of his car and just scraping by, rolls into town to also play in the tournament. Art and Patrick both make the finals and begin to play as Tashi observes from the sidelines. Something is in the air about the three of them.
A flashback to 13 years earlier basically explains why: Art and Patrick were friends in a tennis academy, winning a doubles tournament before going to see young prodigy Tashi play her own match. The three meet up, have a, let’s say, interesting evening together, and Tashi says she will only give her phone number to whichever of the two wins their head-to-head match the next day. Patrick prevails, but over time, especially when Tashi suffers a career-ending injury, she seems to come over to Art. Or does she? Much of the movie plays a little with what Tashi and the two young men really want out of life. Tashi seems to only care about tennis, Patrick walks around with an immature swagger that he may or may not have earned, and Art comes across as the most sincere and maybe well-rounded of the three, a man who really loves his wife and isn’t quite as talented a tennis player as Patrick without Tashi’s help, but he’s no innocent here either. Who will win the match, and what are these players even playing for?
As I stated above, the trailers suggested Tashi was manipulating the hearts of both Patrick and Art here, and that’s not entirely true. It would be much closer to say that all three of them are playing each other, and Tashi’s real issue here isn’t which man she will end up with but what she really wants out of life. The movie itself is structured pretty well, with the flashbacks revealing information as needed, and sometimes flipping back and forth so quickly that the biggest clue as to what time period the movie is currently in is probably with how long Tashi’s hair is. The tennis matches are often cleverly edited, including segments where the camera is showing the point-of-view of Art, Patrick, and at one point, the ball itself. Additionally, each character seems to have different feelings about the game, with Tashi caring the most, Patrick seeming to struggle just to keep himself from growing up, and Art’s maybe wanting to move on to other things as he gets older.
However, the movie doesn’t quite work for me. The acting is fine. The script largely works. But for the life of me, I can’t quite come to care for these characters. I suspect part of it is due to the fact that I am not a sports fan and know very little about tennis beyond the super-basics. I did note, for example, that the flashbacks often showed Tashi preferring the man who was winning the match in the present. It’s not a subtle movie. But in the end, I didn’t care whether any of these characters won or lost, and for someone who is not a sports guy, that’s really important for me to get into a movie where a competition of some kind is a central part of the overall narrative.
Grade: C+
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