Challengers — Movie Review

There’s a scene somewhere near the start of the third act of Challengers where Zendaya’s character, Tashi Duncan, sits courtside at a consequential tennis match. The ball is repeatedly struck violently at ear-piercing volumes while the grunts of effort from each player echo across the court. While most of the on-screen audience watching the match swing their heads back and forth, Duncan looks down at her lap, deep in her thoughts, having lost interest in the spectacle before her.

In many ways, this is the analog to the audience watching the film. It’s impossible to pinpoint the moment Challengers loses its momentum, but it is safe to say it’s near the beginning. The movie, supposedly about a trio of tennis players and their relationship with each other across the span of the better part of two decades, in reality, is wholly reliant on sex. However, the film’s sultry scenes lose their luster quickly, as the characters involved are impossible to care about — the horribly unlikable characters.

The horribly, terribly unlikable characters are portrayed by actors who are quite capable of their craft. We’ve seen most of the performers in Challengers play complex, enjoyable characters in other films when given suitable material. Here, however, they are given nothing, just as the audience is given nothing to latch onto throughout the film’s glacial 131-minute runtime besides nausea-inducing camera tricks intent on keeping its purported topic, tennis, interesting. It does not.

Notable is the presence of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the acclaimed composers of 2010’s The Social Network and 2014’s Gone Girl, alongside various notable projects. More recently, the duo composed the delightful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem score. The pair’s effort for Challengers leaves much to be desired, sounding like a generic brand version of Social Network, with all the intensity and none of the finesse. The resulting eardrum assault is one-note, repetitive, and annoying.

The film is constructed on such flimsy bedrock that all efforts to amp up tension collapse, all characters become unbearable, and all attempts at sparking interest are sullied by the loud, albeit relentlessly dull, experience. Indeed, Challengers is an unlikable film about unlikable people with unlikable results.

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