In many ways, Challengers is two movies in one. The first movie is a very entertaining tennis story about three people who, for better or worse, are always drawn to each other. The second is a movie about two boys who ignore the thing they really want, each other, and instead fixate on a girl the movie at times presents more as a prize than as an actual character. When the movie can convince us it’s the first thing, Challengers is a really good movie. The few times it slips up into the second one, it’s very much not.
Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan is at the center of the promotion and at the center of the movie. She’s fierce, dedicated and when we first meet her, the brains behind Art Donaldson’s career. She’s his coach, his wife, and basically the one who makes everything happen. Many years earlier, though, she was a tennis prodigy in her own right, until an injury cut her own career short and forced her to live vicariously through someone else. However that someone else didn’t necessarily have to be Art. Because there was Patrick.
The movie introduces Art and Patrick as more or less two halves of a whole, and the sad part about Challengers is that for all the suggestion of a love triangle we got in the promo, the movie is relatively tame when it comes to actually exploring Art and Patrick’s relationship in this way. This love triangle is just both boys looking at Tashi, in no way are they looking at each other. But, why aren’t they? It’s hard to tell.
Even harder to decipher is why exactly Tashi is looking at these two ordinary white boys. What does she see in either of them other than a chance to continue in tennis and perhaps be in the circle of success in the sport? Whatever it is the movie never explains. Perhaps we shouldn’t need anything else. That Tashi loves tennis more than Art or Patrick already makes Tashi an interesting protagonist. But the movie leaves way too many of these things to the viewer’s interpretation, and not even Zendaya’s nuanced acting can fill in some of the blanks of the script when it comes to her motivation.
And then there are the bigger issues – like the race dynamics, which the movie, ironically, never touches on. I say ironically because it feels disingenuous to cast Zendaya in the role of Tashi and then pretend there are no race issues to discuss in a movie like Challengers, particularly when Tashi herself makes a reference to her “white boys” at one point in the movie. Is this the sport that Serena Williams built or is it not?
There lies the biggest problem with Challengers. For all that the movie is visually superior, and the tennis shots are spectacular, this feels like tennis 101, but with references that only people who really follow the sport are supposed to catch. So, which is it? Was this even supposed to be about tennis or just a fun movie about the twisted dynamics between three people? Or, was it a story about the rivalry between two men, a rivalry Tashi was always just the prize one of the men was desperate to win?
No matter the answer, the fact that we’re even asking the question is already a problem. It’s not an insurmountable one, of course, and Challengers does manage to entertain more than it does not. But that is sadly, all it does. Entertain. If you were hoping for more than that, this just isn’t the movie for that.
Agree? Disagree? What did you think of Challengers? Share with us in the comments below!
Challengers is in theaters now.