The Blogger Sees a Terrible Movie and Here Shares His Misery

Zendaya in Challengers. That was my expression while watching this dreadful film

Last Summer after surgery I got an infection in my foot that caused excruciating pain. Sitting through the film, Challengers (2024) Guadagnino was worse.

Simply awful.

I almost walked out on it. 

How do you enjoy a movie in which the three main characters are so detestable? Is that what makes for popular American cinema? Arrogant, angry, selfish, soulless people incapable of finding joy in life? It was impossible to say what motivated the characters or indeed if anything beyond sudden impulse did. Very few of their actions made much sense. One would spit at the other in anger, vowing eternal hatred then seconds later they'd make love. It was ridiculous how they shifted from one mood to the next, not over the course of time but over the course of a millisecond. 

Challengers is the story of a two good friends….my god what a difficult story to summarize, I say this because it makes so little sense. Here’s what IMDb said: "Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach, turned her husband into a champion. But to overcome a losing streak, he needs to face his ex-best friend and Tashi's ex-boyfriend.”

Tashi is played by Zendaya, whose work in Euphoria I enjoyed. That she chose to do this film makes one question her judgement. I never for one second understood her character. There was an emptiness to her and for that matter the whole film. What the bloody hell was the point of it all? Were there some truths meant to be found in Challengers? Was there supposed to be a lesson here? Surely we weren’t meant to root for any of these people. We couldn’t have been expected to care about them. 

This was also a failure as a sports movie — good ones are hard enough to make when you have a clear good guy(s) versus bad guy(s) situation. Absent that…. Many of the tennis scenes looked real and were interesting enough but the climactic scene was pure drudgery to watch. Painfully long scenes of a player bouncing a ball before that crucial serve. I wanted to scream at the screen, "serve it already!" Long shots of sweat pouring off a player. (WHY????) A laughable shot of the two players from below as if they were playing on glass. (WHY???) And in this supposedly dramatic conclusion both players going from seeming to wanting desperately to win to looking indifferent about the result. (WHY???)

Speaking of inexplicable…Why the occasional slow motion and montages? They seemed to be for the sake of it. And the overtop rage of some characters after one missed shot or losing a set. What tennis player bashes their racket to pieces in the middle of a match? 

Is Challengers in actuality a mirror into a certain segment of American society today? Is it reflective of the upper class? Was this a movie about the one per cent? Is it an Antonioni like existential examination of the ennui and lack of heart in the privileged? The shallowness at the heart of the upper crust. For the life of me I can’t come up with any other explanation for why this film was made. I also find it astounding that it was so well-received somehow garnering an 89% on Rotten Tomatoes. Did critics feel obligated to like it? If so, why?

Maybe the most shocking thing about Challengers was that the director was Luca Guadagnino who directed Call Me By Your Name, a picture I greatly admired. Was he drunk every day on the set of this one?

My god that was a terrible movie. I'm going to spend the rest of my days trying to forget I ever saw it.