Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (July 15, 2024)
Although 2017’s romantic drama Call Me By Your Name didn’t do much at the box office, it earned ample accolades including an Oscar nomination as Best Picture. To capitalize on this positive momentum, director Luca Guadagnino did the logical thing: he made two consecutive horror films.
Yes, that’s cheap sarcasm, but Guadagnino’s decision to follow his 2017 breakthrough with 2018’s Suspiria and 2022’s Bones and All nonetheless seems mystifying. Sure, both offered “art house horror” but they still felt like perplexing choices for a filmmaker on the rise.
Perhaps Guadagnino eventually recognized this, as 2024’s Challengers changes course. This film takes him closer to the romantic drama of Name.
A former athletic prodigy, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) becomes a tennis coach after a brutal injury ends her playing career. In that position, she helps her husband Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) develop into one of the world’s best players.
When Art suffers through a losing streak, however, he goes into a “Challenger” event intended to help him rebound and regain confidence. This comes with a twist when Art finds himself pitted against Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), his one-time pal and also Tashi’s ex-boyfriend.
Challengers came with some hype as a potential commercial hit, mainly due to the presence of Zendaya. Well-known and popular, she seemed like a possible conduit to box office bucks.
That didn’t occur, as Challengers failed to find much of an audience. With a budget of $55 million, it made $94 million worldwide, so it didn’t turn a profit.
Honestly, Zendaya seems overrated as a possible marquee draw. While she clearly enjoys global fame, her only hit movies have come from flicks where she played a supporting part and didn’t appear to impact ticket sales.
Granted, that becomes difficult to firmly establish. Nonetheless, does anyone believe the Spider-Man and Dune flicks would’ve performed worse without Zendaya involved?
None of this reflects her talent, and to be fair, Challengers actually represents Zendaya’s first primary starring film role. All her prior flicks placed her below others in the credits.
Whatever Zendaya’s draw may be, it seems possible Challengers failed to find much of an audience because the story just didn’t entice viewers. Promos painted it as a mix of sports movie and relationship drama, without a lot of clarity.
Ultimately, that is what we get from Challengers, though it feels like the project hangs almost entirely on one gimmick: “Zendaya gets into a three-way”. Which – spoiler alert? – doesn’t actually happen.
Oh, we get a scene that involves fooling around among Tashi and the two men in her life. However, it stops well short of anything particularly spicy.
As such, anyone who expects Challengers to give us erotic thrills – or naked Zendaya - will likely leave disappointed. It does manage to work in other ways, though not in an especially rich manner.
Challengers tends to offer a fairly stock love triangle tale, with tennis as the backdrop. The “big match” between Art and Patrick intends to add some tension, but it feels perfunctory.
It also leaves Challengers as a bit of a mish-mash. The movie hangs on a combination of sports film and relationship drama, but the first domain doesn’t seem to really engage Guadagnino.
The character elements don’t exactly soar either, mainly because they feel fairly trite. Indeed, at times I wondered if Guadagnino intends Challengers as a parody of the genres it covers.
Not that it plays for overt laughs or camp. However, the film just fails to offer anything original and it leans far enough into melodrama and what the audience theoretically expects that it often plays like a spoof.
Challengers also gets less interesting as it goes. Despite the cliché elements, the first act manages a reasonable amount of intrigue as it builds the characters and situations.
However, the movie eventually just starts to drag. This happens largely because we never really invest in the story or its participants.
Do I care if Art beats Patrick in the tournament? Nope.
Do I care if Patrick beats Art in the tournament? Nope.
Do I care how the Tashi/Art/Patrick love triangle develops/resolves? Nope.
A character movie in which I don’t care about the characters becomes problematic. Guadagnino invests the project with just enough pizzazz to make it watchable but it never develops into anything particularly good.
