Film Review - Challengers (2024)

Challengers is the new film by director Luca Guadagnino and stars Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor as three young tennis pros who meet in the late 2000’s and form a love triangle of sorts but many years later Tashi (Zendaya’s character) has fallen for Art (Faist’s character) and now he finds himself a waning pro but before he can go for one last championship shot he’ll have to face Patrick (O’Connor’s character) in a tennis match.

Challengers was a film that I had heard a lot of good things about before seeing it and the feeling I got reading early reviews was that this was potentially better than Dune Part Two and going into it I was expecting this hot, steamy film with electric chemistry between it’s leads and I didn’t get that instead I found myself very mixed on this movie as a whole.

First off Zendaya is terrific here and along with her work in the Dune films by Denis Villeneuve she shows what a great young talent she can be when she has a good character and a good director she can work with as opposed to her forgettable work in the Spider-Man films where it feels like she was just told to stand there, hit her marks, say her lines and it will all be added in post production and those films waste her where as here and in Dune she’s great.

Also I liked the tennis scenes, they are well directed and have some real energy to them and I also liked the storyline of Faist’s character as the seasoned professional wanting one last shot at the elusive open championship he hasn’t been able to get.

But what didn’t work as well was the love triangle, the hot steamy chemistry I had heard about before seeing it wasn’t really there, those scenes are okay but didn’t really do it for me and it isn’t helped that both Faist and O’Connor didn’t really do it for me in their performances, Faist I loved in West Side Story and I could see him becoming a lead after that film but whatever Steven Spielberg saw in him isn’t there under Guadagnino’s direction and it’s a real shame as he’s a good young actor.

But the real weak link here was O’Connor, both his performance and his character did next to nothing for me, the latter is a terrible person and you just don’t know why Tashi would fall for him and O’Connor’s performance just felt flat at times and the rivalry he had with Art didn’t really work for me either, I wish that the love triangle segment had been scaled down so this tennis rivalry could be brought into more focus as I found that much more interesting.

And so that was Challengers and it’s a mixed bag for me overall, some parts work, other parts didn’t, 2 and a half out of 5.