If you guys can take and handle this challenge, then maybe you should do it from the bottom of your heart and muscles, and just watch this piece of work offered by movie director Luca Guadagnino. Challengers centers on Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy turned coach, who is married to a champion on a losing streak. However, her strategy for her husband’s redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his former best friend and Tashi’s former boyfriend. As their pasts and presents collide, and the tensions run high, Tashi must ask herself, what will it cost and take to win.
The film contains a short acting trio of Zendaya (MCU’s Spider-Man films), Josh O’Connor (Netflix’s The Crown), and Mike Faist (Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story). They are both portrayed as Tashi Duncan, Patrick, and Art Donaldson respectively in the film. The trio’s performances are truly astonishing, but Zendaya is the heart and soul of the film as she carries a massive amount of extra helpings with providing the themes and concepts of ambition, obsession of winning, relationship issues, rivalry, and one’s own competition. To me, Zendaya carries her own signature role as both a protagonist and an antihero at the same time, coming here to train and to coach the two main actors as well as herself onscreen if she wants a score to settle for the film. O’Connor and Faist, on the other hand, share their screen times together beautifully.
Challengers was originally going to be released last year but due to the SAG-AFTRA strike happening, it got pushed to April 2024. It is the eighth film directed by Oscar-nominee Luca Guadagnino, who is known for directing Call Me By Your Name, which features the main star of Timothée Chalamet and the now-disgraced actor Armie Hammer. The film received four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Chalamet, and has won Best Adapted Screenplay. The film seems like it is heavily based on the true story, but it’s actually an original idea, though it may seem like to does have the feeling and the atmosphere of being truly based on a true story, given that fact that most sports-drama films would often be based on one’s own journey to sports, such as King Richard, Ford v. Ferrari, and the recent King Arthur movie with Mark Wahlberg. The writing is great, but the cinematography on the tennis-playing scenes is gorgeous. The flashbacks, however, are just distracting just to cram all the things up.
Thanks to her incredible performance, Zendaya greatly settles the score in Challengers. I know it’s a sports-drama film based on what the director is trying to make, but to me, based on the performances and the onscreen chemistry with O’ Connor and Faist, I actually believed this film to be a coming-of-age LGBTQ+ film just to focus on the two. But with Zendaya being present all over for the film’s entirety, it would often be treated as both a sports-drama film and a coming-of-age film at the same time painstakingly. By chance, she could be nominated for many awards (such as the Oscars) as Best Actress in a leading role. Luca Guadagnino may be a good director, but the guy knows how to make some magic at his own movie sets and productions. Although I would imagine Timothée Chalamet would appear in the film, either as one of the main actors or as a cameo, it would fully be a Luca-Guadagnino experience, a Dune experience, or simply a Chalamet-Zendaya experience.
GRADE: A
Photo credit: Amazon MGM Studios
Movies365 by Henry Pham 
Leave a comment