Aren't you everybody's type?

Continuing my trip up Empire's top 20 films of 2024

#4 :  Challengers

Luca Guadagnino serves up an absolute ace with his erotically-charged tennis thriller Challengers, which sees a trio of young tennis champs Tashi (Zendaya), Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) enter into a toxic triangle of love, lust, and ruthless ambition. Spanning over a decade, with our leads meeting as teenagers before becoming friends, enemies, lovers and spouses, writer Justin Kuritzkes’ script perfectly weaves together the desires of all three characters, the power dynamics constantly shifting, the audience always kept guessing who’ll come out on top. All three actors are remarkable, the chemistry between every combination of them making their ongoing romantic chaos more than believable, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ synthy score keeps your pulse pounding. It’s sexy, it’s sweaty, and Guadagnino’s innovative cinematic treatment of the tennis itself has to be seen to be believed. Now, anyone for a churro?

I've heard this is good but there would never have been any chance of me watching it - I'm not entirely sure why but sports movies rarely do it for me. But Luca Guadagnino has produced quite interesting yet off-beat fare the two times we've previously met him, so I'm interested to see what we've got here.

Well, I don't need to describe any of the plot to you because Empire has done all that's necessary above, although I do have some issues with some of their statements, which we'll come on to later. But the whole film is definitely very much about Tashi, Art and Patrick and their various, nominally tennis-related, goings on over the course of a number of years.

And the "number of years" thing is done well. I think they used a combination of aging and dee-aging tricks to make the characters change over the years, but it definitely worked for me. And the actors all do a good job throughout - it's our third visit with Zendaya (both Dune films - it's weird we've avoided all her Spider-man outings), our third visit with Josh O'Connor (God's Own Country and La Chimera) and our second visit with Mike Faist (West Side Story). But...

...do they have great chemistry? A lot of the problem is that Zendaya really is very cool and she's just way out of either Mike Faist or Josh O'Connor's league, so I struggled to see why she put up with them. Another problem is that the characters (particularly the guys) are mostly unlikeable and do some pretty stupid things, so I did some eye-rolling at times. But...

...I did care how it all worked out. And it actually had quite an interesting ending in that it was neat, silly and inconclusive all at the same time. And generally, I'd say this is well written - even if I often didn't like what the characters were doing. I can also believe that a lot of the sports dynamics around confidence, ability, training, ambition etc are accurate - it's not really something I've come across in my life for some strange reason. But...

...at times, the way it's filmed made me wonder what Luca was thinking. A lot of things happen at a slow pace - it's as though they're in semi-slomo mode. I'm not entirely sure why - I assume it's some kind of "life imitates sport" kinda thing, but it was lost on me. I also have to say that some of the tennis action goes on for far too long and the animated tennis balls are just annoying.

But let's end on a positive note - the soundtrack is very cool and works way better within the context of the film than as a standalone album. And I have to give a shout out to Darnell Appling for being the coolest tennis umpire ever.

So - did I like it?!? Hmmm - there are interesting aspects to it but I think I have to fall down on the side of "No". However, I also think it's aimed at a younger crowd, so I imagine the film doesn't overly care what I think about it. If you fancy it, it's available to watch on Amazon Prime or to rent in all the usual places. 

#5 - Worth checking out, but maybe not as great as all that
#3 - I liked this a lot